Ep 109: Building an advice business through content - Pete Matthew, CEO & Chartered Financial Planner | Jacksons Wealth Management

This session provides general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is not personal advice. The user express may not reflect net wealth, and net wealth may receive fees for products' disgust. Police eat professional advice before acting. I think we can probably do a little bit of work as advisors and advice firms to just sort of simplify things and take a step back and pack it all. You have these family office principles, every generation eventually, the principal changes. The operations role is much more tactical as opposed to somebody who can handle and ensure really the execution of the firm's growth strategy. Literally, I've gone deep into some pretty technical subjects, and hopefully in a way that enables people to not only grasp them, but can say, "How can I apply this for my individual situation?" Hi, and welcome to Between Meetings with Matt Hiner. In this podcast series, NetWell CEO and Managing Director chats to industry leaders and innovators with local and global expertise. They discuss the latest technologies, business models, and demographic changes, as well as leadership lessons and trends that are impacting financial services. We hope you enjoy their unique insights. Welcome to this episode of Between Meetings. Today, we've got Pete Matthew joining us from the UK very early in the morning. Thanks for joining us, Pete. No worries, Matt. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. This is definitely the earliest I've ever recorded, so let's hope it's all right. I'm sure you will be good as we progress through these podcast people understand by very comfortable just to let you go. We came across you, or a group of people met with you almost a month ago now as part of the NetWell Study Tour. Unfortunately, it wasn't on that trip, but it had fantastic feedback, which is why the team was really keen to get us on the pod container. Before we start, it'd be great just to hear about you and a bit of your history. I'm 51 years old, married nearly 30 years to Joanne. I've got two grown-up girls, Ellie who's 26 and Kate who's 23. I live in the very far southwest of the UK in Cornwall. So the town is called Penzance, subject of a famous Gilbertan Sullivan, Pirates of Penzance. So like, right down, right in the sticks surrounded by the sea. You're going to live in the UK, man. It's the best place to live, right? I've got access to it from Cornwall. Is it surfed down there, which I always thought was amusing, given how cold it must be? Yeah, the water's cold, but the surf is good, certainly in some of the beaches. I'm from the North of England, but married a Cornish girl, so my fate was sealed, really. So I've been a financial planner for 28 years now, went through some traditional career path, working for a couple of insurance companies, then became independent, moved to Cornwall in 2002, Joanne and I met at university, and was fortunate to be asked to buy into my company, which is called Jackson's back in 2007. So for many years, I have co-owned a practice and I've retired off several of my colleagues. Now it's sort of 350 million under management, 26 people, eight advisors, and we're having great fun. And we like to think we're doing things somewhat differently, which I'm sure we'll get to. So we run a four-day week, for example, pay our staff for five days, and we only work for four. So we'll talk about that, I'm sure, later on. And also, as a weird little sideline in 2010, I started messing around with the video camera, creating YouTube videos when nobody was watching YouTube videos back then. And that has become a bit of a monster. It's a business in its own right. It sends 90% of the business to my practice, and it's really interesting, challenging work that we get. So my wife has taken a turn that perhaps I couldn't have seen 20 years ago when I first joined the company. We're having a ball, man, and I'm very excited about the future. Before we get into maybe a little bit more about your business, and in particular, what you're doing with the video camera, and with the podcast, one of the comments that we got back from our recent study tour was it was almost like seeing all the UK wealth industry. It was almost like looking into a into the future, and the direction that was heading is really where we're going to be probably in the next five years. So let's just also just going to be a litmus test on how you think the industry is fearing over there. And what the last three or four years of being like as you I guess transitioned out of RDR. Yeah, I remember she said I mean like RDR is now like 13 years ago, which is incredible. I read the very first discussion paper by the then regulator, the FSA, and you know, I think this was going to be big, right? My colleagues who are considerably older than me, they were like, no, that'll never come in. And he was all about raising the minimum level of qualification, abolishing commission on investment and pension products. It's still there for insurance, and just basically raising the bar. We just knew it would kind of cut out a lot that I just asked am I allowed to swear? Yes, right? Say in a thick in a thick accent. Yeah. Right. It could have a lot of the shit from the industry basically, right? Just get rid of the people who were playing at it, the commission hungry salespeople. And hopefully it would kind of distill the industry a little bit into a more quality. It's kind of raised the bar up somewhere near towards law and accountancy. The professions are much more respected. Jury's out to whether it's fully achieved that, but I think it was the biggest step. So I mean, the last few years, I think, have been, you know, the inexorable push towards proper financial planning. I think there's still not enough for that going on. I think too many people pay lip service to it. It's just in the, in the pursuit of assets and the management, which is fine. But I think there's no enough real financial planning going on still just by not so humble opinion. Lots of mergers and acquisitions. I mean, I'm at the age now where a lot of mine mates are selling. You know, people who I've known for 20 odd years now, you know, selling and, you know, all power to them. And I've yet to see a good outcome from that. I'm still waiting for the first time when somebody sells and it's entirely a positive thing. My experience from watching from the sidelines so far is that there's been very much negative outcomes from all of that for everybody except the person who's selling. And so lots of M&A going on. The weight of regulation has been massively increasing, which I think discourages smaller companies, discourages startups. It's very, very hard to get directly regulated now. So the networks are doing pretty well, very enough. So, you know, it's changing. It's funny though, you know, like everything changes, but then everything stays the same. So lots of stuff going on. There's still far too few advisors. The record 9% of UK adults who could see advice actually get it. And so like everywhere in the world, we've got the rise of the financial influencer and people turning to Charlie PT, Claude and everything for their financial advice. So some challenges, but some opportunities as well. When we got the similar in Australia, we saw a huge reduction in the number of advisors, literally more than half, overnight. It was a similar experience, I think, in the UK. And have you seen advisors coming back into the market? Or is it just a name you could borrow as that growth and it's really only offsetting those leaving? Oh, yeah, I don't think there's been any major offset of those that left. Obviously, you know, if you were of a certain age and you'd made enough money, that was kind of your cue to call it a day. So I had two colleagues that applied to really they were never going to get the higher exams. One of them actually kind of did it on principle, because he didn't want to be kicked out of the, you know, the industry. So, you know, the whole of the year before I came in, he did all the actual work he just stood in and got his exams just so that he wasn't kicked out. So you can sort of leave on his own terms. And then he left a year later, so it seemed like a lot of effort for nothing to me. So, you know, tons of people of a certain age, or of a complete lack of disposition to do exams, they just left. The banks laid off advisors in the tens of thousands. There was a point where there were 300,000 people in the UK who called themselves financial advisors. That was a pretty broad church, right? That could be anything from mortgage to general insurance or whatever. But it's now about 35,000, so it's a lot more than half. And there are still far too few young entrants that still probably more people retiring than are joining. So we got a real PR problem, I think, as a profession, I mean, to sort of do what we kind of fix that and make it attractive. And there's some good stuff going on, but it's very small scale at this point. So yeah, it was a big deal. I was cataclysmic, really. And we haven't recovered if we're talking about advising numbers being a measure of kind of health. I think 300,000 was way too many for a population of 65 million. You know, but you'd be good if it was 100,000 advisors in the UK, I think. So probably being fantastic for your business because these clients have to go somewhere. But what's the general approach to what we call over here, the advice gap where you've got far too many Australians needing advice and far few advisors to give it? Is it technology? How are people trying to solve for it? Yeah, I mean, the industry, there's some sort of good stuff like what we're originally turned to robo advisors here, which call for nothing at the store, the basically guide these press platforms. Yeah, there's profile. Here's a portfolio that matches, send as you money, something that's not real advice going on there. There is a move by the FCA to bring in something called the name, just pop down my head. I think something like simplified guidance or something like that, it will come back to me. And it's a kind of, they've somewhat loosened the sort of compliance necessities for certain cases. So they are basically allowing providers, primarily, this is going to be the banks that will be all over this to say, well, okay, somebody of this broad demographic, you know, age, family, status, job, income, status, things like that. This product would broadly apply to that broad demographic, and they're going to be able to sell that product to that broad demographic with a much reduced sort of compliance burden. This very early stage is it's not really kicked in yet. So I think the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. You know, we'll see whether that turns out to be a good thing or not. But something's got to be done to Brucey Advisca, because at the minute is mostly being filled by social media, I think. Sure, the AI models. will gradually take over, or at least massively, increase their share of online questions about financial planning. And of course, they'll get increasingly better at it. You and I both know machines will never be able to empathize or pick up subconscious, nonverbal cues in the way that a very good experienced financial planner can. So I'm not even remotely scared that AI is going to take my job, but I think AI hopefully will do great work in improving the general financial health of people, as long as it's trained properly in the promter, right? I'm very positive about AI, and I think that's going to be the thing that will make the difference because there just aren't enough advisors coming in. Is there a rule of thumb in the UK as far as the sort of average number of customers that one advisor considers? Yeah, I mean, everybody puts out the sort of 150 number I remember the guy's name who came up with that. But there's the size of the village before it. Yeah, yeah, you know, there's studies and stuff. So everybody says about 150. Our guys, at Jackson's, we kind of used as a rule of thumb. I noticed Michael Kitzis came out. They put something out on LinkedIn yesterday about something like the best advisors can only handle 50 clients. I would massively dispute that with the help of technology and and a great team. So, you know, as ever, general comments are good for clicks and engagement, so there's always far too much nuance really. Or there should be more nuance. So yeah, I would say we generally were 250, but with great support, power planning, client relationship management help as well. So the advisor is the sort of link pain of the relationship, but they get a lot of help with it. You know, and we're fortunate in that we're a big enough team so that the advisors can go on holiday and not have to share their email. But one of the interesting concepts that the team brought back was this idea of academies. I believe there's a number of academies that have sort of grown in the UK where their primary objectives to find the next generation of financial advisors and that those academies are often funded by the large advice firms. Is that accurate? That's exactly right. So it tends to be the big wealth management firms. So your math bombs, your M&G, St. James's place, those are the big sort of players. My fear with those, I mean, purely in the abstract, I think probably the training will be great because these guys have got scale. I mean, these are St. James's place, I think last count was a FTSE 100 company or it's certainly close. So it's massive, massive company, one of the biggest companies in the UK. So they've got the scale and the and the cloud to be able to do that really, really well. I mean, I was trained by my first employer, the insurance company with the co-op insurance companies at hand. And you know, the training was brilliant. Proper residential courses by really good trainers flew through there admittedly, quite basic exams at the time because the training was brilliant. I'm sure that is the case in the academies. My one big fear is that it's a bit of a sausage machine and I have a real issue with some of the business models of those big companies where they are kind of saddling advisors with massive debt. Makes it very difficult to leave. The contrast can be quite punitive. And I just worry that a naive new entrant will get great training and they're not paying for it, regretting it for the first 15 years, potentially, their career. So I just want to argue it's better than nothing. The, you know, the cost of training. So it's hard for a smaller business to do it. So yeah, I think it's, so the jury's out again. They're relatively new these academies. I just, I'm a little bit skeptical. I really try not to be skeptical. Do you know what I mean? I mean, I kind of return a lot to Mr. I want to kind of think the best of people, but I just worry about the business model and how it might trap young advisors. So I think the needs to be a better way. There is some good stuff like Coventry University is I think the only university in the country that does a proper financial planning degree and the students come out with a diploma level qualification so they could come out on advice legally coming. You know, they know the theory, but wouldn't have done anything about dealing with actual clients, but that's good. They trade off between the other technical and the soft skills. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And of course, you know, both know which of those is more important, right? But you know, it's a great star and it's an accessible way to get young people in, but it's, you know, we're talking sort of 10 or 15 students at a time. So it's not going to make a dent, but it's a brilliant star. We need to encourage that. I'm just, there's a whole heap of stuff I'd like to cover and pick your grain on. Just the last comment. So for moving forward from a regulatory perspective, is there anything that excites you about the direction at the moment over the next three to five years? Because presumably the pendulum swung very heavily one way and now it's starting to settle back. Yeah, I mean, from a rag perspective, I'm not sure. It's hard to get excited about ragging. It's hard to get excited. Yeah. Let me go and refine that. Is there something of interest that's good? For me, I think with the rise of the machines, I'm excited and always have been about the future of really good, what we often call full, fat financial planning here. Really deep dive, you know, emotionally intelligent understanding the client on a, on a deep level and then smart, intelligent, complex, detailed, holistic financial planning. I can't, I imagine a future yet where a human faced with arguably the biggest financial transition of their life that should we retire, can we retire? I can't judge any scenario if somebody's going to have that conversation with a bot. And that makes me pleased, obviously, because it means I'll have a job and sell my colleagues for a while. Yeah. And I think the other things that are happening will shine a real light on financial planning done right? I mean, we're already sort of two or three times oversubscribed. And so we're trying to grow into that. And I think that bodes very well. The chat switch gears now. You mentioned finfluences a couple of times. It's terrible. It's hard to say. Terrible. And yet in some ways, you were the original back in 2010, online talking about no doubt financial planning and financial planning issues. What I want to know is a why you decided to go down that path, but also how have you managed to attract the complex, difficult clients that you have through that channel? It makes it. Yes. It's funny in it. I'd love to say my love. I know I'm doing it, right? But I basically just kind of doggedly carried on doing something which seemed to be working and learning as I go. So you asked why I started doing it. I mean, I tend to say that three things came together at the right time, which were the triggers. So one was there in various areas of my life. People told me I was good at explaining things. So at work, my kids, you know, around the dinner table, they were young children. Then I was a governor in their primary school. I was a lay preacher at church. So people in these various spheres, people would just say, you know, you really came across well. Are you explained that really clearly? And that kind of sunk in. And my dad was a teacher as well as a minister, church minister. So I guess the teaching day and maybe is in there. My brother also teaches. And then I had a kind of realization that I wanted to do a little bit more than just help reach people get richer. And I don't have any issue with that. Not kind of moral angst over it. But I wanted to do a little bit more. I kind of wanted to scale to some degree. And that kind of percolated, you know, is there something that I could do here to reach more people aware of the advice gap? The RDR was in law, but hadn't come in to force in 2010. It came into force the end of 2012. That was the second thing. And then the third thing was that I read a book called Crush It by one of my online heroes, Gary Vaynerchuk. So he was a very early adopter of YouTube and video just to talk about his thing, which for him in those days was wine. Because he took his dad's wine shop in New York from four million years to 60 million year, basically, by going online on video every single day and tasting three wines. Of course, he's big personality in New Jersey doesn't talk like most wine people attracted to following business went nuts. And the premise of his book was, look, there are no gatekeepers now. There's no kind of directors or producers telling you that you haven't got the right face or the right voice or you to foul. However, and just if the message is good, and if you put it out there consistently, people will show up. And therefore what an opportunity to teach and to market. So I thought I'd never go. Literally, those three things kind of coalesced. I bought a flip camera, which is now on a shelf over the other side of the room as a kind of trophy. And started talking to it. I just, I'm going to explain how money works because I think we've got a problem coming down the line where more and more people will be disenfranchised from good advice. So I'm going to teach you how money works. So you can do this yourself. And essentially, I've built a career on telling people that they don't need to see a financial planner that they can do it themselves if they've got kind of the wit, the time, and the energy. So that's why it started, man. And I still go in it. I'm sort of, you know, 10 million views on YouTube later, nearly 9 million podcasts downloads, you know, hundreds of thousands of people a month consuming the stuff. And I've built a business off the back of it. Honestly, we've sort of more than quintupled the size of the business in the last seven years. That's incredible audience and growth over that period. How long are the typical podcasts and how frequently are you doing them? So we're very careful and it's quite important to whatever platform you're on to create content native to that platform. So for example, I have a YouTube channel. Those are textbook YouTube videos. So between 18, 13, 14 minutes long, single subject, mostly a piece of camera like I'm sort of doing with you now with graphics occasion, and explaining things. So that's kind of one form of content. The podcast, which is also now videoed, by the way, just to confuse things is usually around 40 minutes long. is I have a co-host, my now retired colleague from Jackson's and best mate in the world, Roger Weeks. He co-hosts with me and we sort of chat and answer questions and also sometimes we'll deal with a single subject in depth, sometimes even over a couple of episodes. A lot of time it's just Q&A, we'll answer after a dozen questions and we've got massive backlog to work through. But that's on a different YouTube channel. And of course, that is also released audio only like all podcasts. So different kind of content for different platforms is really important. But it's funny, my audience now looks like me. I've been doing it 16 years. I was 35 when I started, right? It's not a gray air on my head and you know, a couple of still on my head and now the audience looks like me. Gray headed retirement is hoping interview on the horizon and so meaningful money has become a more of a retirement focused kind of project. And so I wanted to backfill for the younger folks. And so I don't know for four or five months ago, I started a new podcast called Bank of Dad with my youngest daughter Kate. So she hosts it and I'm basically the premises that I'm teaching her in front of a camera. She knows a lot about finance already, but she's asking the questions that her peers are. And so we have an episode dealing with like credit cards or what does your pay slip mean that you get every month? Just to try and teach younger adults the basics and to get them on the right path really. So for me, it's about helping as many people as we can and go figure, you know, you build a career telling people they don't need advice and yet we're busier than ever. That's just how the internet works. Imagine a world where wealth technology is simplified. Netwealth is continually investing in new tools and platform features to optimize your staff productivity and to give you and your clients the best user experience. With our managed accounts functionality, bring new efficiency and scale to your investment operations. A world of technology awaits. Discover it at netwealth.com.au/wu And so on that, we've seen a couple of local businesses, obviously media commentators, newspapers and increasingly online and digital. Part of the challenge that they had was that you build a huge audience, potentially you generate a huge number of leads, but you've got to be very careful and strict around the lead processing and who are the right clients to actually see. How do you manage that process? You pre-qualifying them on the website. How do they find you and how do you make sure that they fit your ideal client type? Yeah, that's really a question man. It's like part of it. I think it starts with the content itself. So if your content is basically holding nothing back. So yeah, literally I've gone deep into some pretty technical subjects and hopefully in a way that enables people to not only grasp them but can say how can I apply this for my individual situation. If you go deep, you're probably going to cut out the real sort of simple stuff where people just like what I can easily do that is that I don't need to see an advisor to open a pension or an ISA tax-free investment vehicle. We don't get those. You know, we don't get people saying I've got 20 grand with a credit card. Can you help me credit card debt? Can you help me get out of it? We don't get any of that. So I'd love to say that that was intentional amount but that's basically happened by accident by just giving all the content that I would give alive with a client in front of me and holding anything back. What we get is the kind of clients that both need us and we like to work with. For us, the qualification, I'll explain how we do it in a minute. For us, we are more likely to say no to somebody because we'll say you can do it yourself. I'm not going to charge you five grand to rubber stamp what you've already done a really good job on because we have finite resources. We have a finite amount of values that we can add and I would rather help the family over here with young adult children but with, you know, special needs, autism or whatever. And so we're planning for the long-term care of that child than the perfectly wealthy person who's already got everything brilliantly organized, low cost funds and everything. And they just want a professional to say, well done. We're not going to spend time doing that, right? And so when somebody gets in touch, you know, there are videos on our Jackson's website. So people might watch the meaningful money content, two separate companies, two separate brands, by the way, might come back to that. And there was content and there's a page on the side that says work with Pete. And that essentially links to the Jackson's website because now we're in a regulated world, right? And there's a video and there's a form for them to complete. They complete that form and it comes in and they get invited to book in and they get a video before they book in. So there's consistency because it's me in my face and my voice telling them what to expect. All right. And some people they don't, you know, they don't either don't book in or they cancel because they realize actually that it's not for them. Fees are on the website, fully disclosed, right off front. So that kind of gets rid of any tire kickers or somebody, you know, we very occasionally get somebody to say, can you do a discount on that? So we see answers and in fact, you know, why would I do that? We've not got three times as many people want to work with me as we can call with. And so with the pre the qualification happens and even then when we have an initial call, which is very structured, it's about, can we help? How can we help? Do we want to help? But it's, you know, in order to understand that, we need to know a lot about the client situation. So we ask very structured questions. I do it. I do it. My practice manager does them. And we kick out maybe one in three, something like that, maybe, maybe maybe one in two. So it's, we were pretty good at thinning out. And then we've got better at it. I have to say because my gut feeling is to help everybody. But that's, we nearly burnt down last year because of that. So we've got a lot better about being a bit more careful about who we take on. Given that your rate is national and and very broad, what's your typical service delivery? Is it all virtual? Do you have people coming into the office or is it a bit of a hybrid? Yeah, both, I mean, Jackson's he's been a business is 1974. So we've got a big low call client base as well. But most of our business new business doesn't come from call now. About 10% does. So we got a lovely office right on the harbor front. So people can come in. It's amazing actually because call mall is a holiday venue. People say actually, I'm going to come down for a week and I'll see, well, I'm down. You know, I'm going to come down on holiday. So that's cool. But the vast majority of it is virtual only. And I remember the first client that came from me for money, they were in Bexil on sea, which about 350 miles from here. And I said, okay, right. Let's set up a deep, do you Skype? You know, remember Skype? Right. And so we did Skype and and that is funny because like nine years later, we're in lockdown. And the industry press are over here is doing like, you know, here are 10 tips to do better client Zoom meetings. Well, by then I've been doing it for a decade. And so it's things like eyeballing the camera and all that sort of stuff. It goes a long way. And and so most of its virtual we have booths, which are soundproofed and ventilated. So, you know, it doesn't take up the space of a whole office. We have meeting rooms as well. And we have really, really fast internet. So and we've I've trained the guys, you know, to speak to the camera, but drop their eyes occasionally and just check client responses. You know, so when you say something that you think my care response just drop your eyes so that you can see how did that land? And it's obviously, it's like 95% as good as being in the room with somebody, but it's not quite as good as being in the room with somebody. Heck, technical skills to another level. Yeah, man. It's the way it's got to be done. Given that your daughter is now involved. So, she's planning in your business and looking after younger clients, or it's just a bit of that. She's looking for it. No, she's she's marketing the comms. Honestly, I agonized over making her a nipple baby. But she's actually she's a phenomenal communicator. And essentially, she's helping me scale what we do. Both here at Meaning for Money and sort of what we call internal comms. I eat to clients at Jackson's. So, you know, we're working on a library of content essentially for clients only. So yeah, so she's helping me with that. Ultimately, my practice manager was just like, like, I need you to do more video. I need you to do this down. I'm like, cool. If you can find an extra day a week, then let's do that. But actually why needed was help. Find an extra day a week. Then let's do that. And so that's what Kate is doing. And the Bank of Dad thing is it's part of that. Because even though probably the target audience for that show isn't the sort of clients that we want to trust, that's kind of secondary. What we want to do is help people primarily. We sounds a bit nauseatingly altruistic, but that is the primary notification. So it's worth doing for that reason alone. And we have fun. Given that you mentioned a lot of your customers now look a lot like you. You also look quite young from where I'm sitting. And how do you think you've had intergenerational planning? I mean, it's currently in transit to what we do. When I kind of explain the sort of at-retirement planning process to prospective clients and to clients is fairly simple. It's like, right, what's coming in? What income have you got coming in? What do you expect expected outflows, both regular and that hawk as far as we can see those things? First question is, have you got enough? Do you have enough? Are you going to be okay? The answer is the simple, yes or no, or probably. And once we've established they're going to be okay, then we're in the realms of optimization and nuance. So that's where we really add the value, right? So we spend our lives balancing broadly three things. Lifetime tax, So and short and long-term tax. Sometimes we might incur more tax in a short turn to incur less later on Bit of a gamble. We don't know how long they're gonna live so income and tax balancing that across their life is the first thing We have to kind of optimize for legacy huge part of it. We generally deal with wealthy clients They don't want to ruin their kids, but they do want to help them and so that's a real and obviously they don't want to pay on necessary inheritance tax when they die and then the third thing is we generally call it diversification by which we mean Sources or places from which they can draw money. So business that they got rental property if they got You know pension posts non-pension posts tax-free non-pension posts, you know, they got different sources so that we can You know help them optimize Where they draw from on a year-by-year basis so income and taxation Legacy diversification of withdrawal sources those three things are what we need to balance and I could have two people with Identical financial situations, but their output would be different because they have different priorities So I incurred I recently recommended a client to who was 65 That's we did the plan is a lot between 65 and 90 we are going to incur you an extra half a million pounds worth of income tax But in so doing we will save you two million quit of inheritance tax, and that was their priority So it's weird for an advisor to say hey, you need to pay more tax now But of course the benefit for them was what was most important for them which was legacy. So you know, that's for us Multi-generational legacy planning is a core part of of the sort of retirement planning piece It comes more into focus later on obviously, but we are nudging clients earlier than they might consider it themselves so You know, there's lots of stats about you know, the first generation makes it second generation kind of holds it and the third generation blows it and What sure how true that is this like all sort of rules of thumb, but we just want to help people Give with warm hands and equip their kids You know as best they can and keep as much money in the family. So it's fun technical but fun switching gears There's a couple of things before we go that I just wanted to give you more information on the first was you mentioned A couple of different brands the difference between many for money and Jackson's and moving from what it sounded Like an unregulated to a regulated environment just how you manage that and then maybe just as an extension Before we move on to last topic just any thoughts advice for people or advisors in Australia Think you about maybe starting up their own podcast or video channel. Yeah, so again more vaccine than design I chose not to go for a personal brand right so it's meaningful money. It's not, you know, Pete Matthew talks money or whatever So I mean that has kind of served me well. I've never ever had any issues. I've had compliance people crawl all over my work And they've never found anything of concern. I think it's quite easy to stay the right side of the rules So you know if you got these unregulated unqualified Influences pimping, you know contracts the difference trading apps and all that sort of stuff crypto schemes I mean, that's just I mean that's practically fraud right that stuff just needs showing down But if a qualified advisor says in a non-regulated environment This is a pension. This is an iser. These are the differences and these are why you might consider one over the other As long as I'm not saying hey and Vanguard have got a brilliant new fund. You should check it out Then across the line, right? And so for me, it's easy to stay the right side of the line and How we kind of demarcated that there's lots of discussion and planning going on about how we bring them closer together But I think having a non-regulated Brand and company and a regulated one makes life a little easier What we are really clear about is when somebody gets in touch about potentially working with us at Jackson's We obviously go through the full disclosure process and I'd literally say You've read the books. You've watched the videos. That's all just general info. You work with us here You've got all the weight of protection as a consumer financial services and regulation So let me explain how that works. This is a different relationship now And they're like yeah, yeah totally understand that and so it's it's easy for us to keep the two separate and I think it's easy to stay the right side of the line For anybody listening or watching to this that's thinking about doing a podcast do it and don't think twice But commit because it's hard work First thing you should do is write down And I generally say to people to start with the questions that they get asked by clients Right because if you're working with clients you can ask the same questions all the time Answer them Whether in podcast written form or on a piece to camera video You don't need fancy kit. You can build that up over time my first camera was a hundred pounds The cameras I use I used three now and they're 20,000 quid between them So it's like you don't need 20 grand with the cameras, but I like kit and the podcast looks great as a result So you know you don't need kit boy. You need his content So write down 50 if you can't write down 50 subjects. I don't think you'll make it But as you're writing you'll think oh right. There's a subset there. There's another episode there potentially And then just start answering them read a book called endless customers by Marcus Sheridan It's a follow-up to a brilliant book of his that I used to recommend called they ask you answer Now I recommend his new one endless customers Just answer the questions because people will find you because they're asking those questions of YouTube and chat gbt and all that And they will find you And then once they've consumed your stuff for a bit they've subscribed and they're used to hearing your voice in your face They're not going to go anywhere Honestly, he's funny. I spoke to a guy this week who there's obviously quite a bunch of financial youtubers now and some of them are Regulated they are they're still advice clients and you know, I had to go so why if I've spoken to James Shaq and I spoke to Somebody else can't remember and now I'm speaking to you. It's like cool You know, so I guess there's more people do it. They'll potentially be more competition But I've always said that somebody else could take my exact words and deliver them to camera And he would resonate with a different set of people because they are them and I'm me I die doubtless turn some people off. I'm always getting shouted out for waving my answer when I talk So the YouTube comments somebody said you should plug this guy into the national grid Yes, so generating a like just do my hands You know, so I'm going to turn some people off for the same words delivered by somebody else will attract somebody else So I just think the more the merrier the more good information we put out there the better Just do it. Don't hold anything back give it all away for free unlike the universal calf you but be consistent for God's say Most podcasts don't make it past three episodes. It's something death like Only as some two in ten make it past three episodes and only ten in a hundred make it past ten episodes It's just like Crazy numbers. You've got to be consistent. You've got to commit for a year And learn the craft obviously But I can't think of a much better place to call it reps on this conversation. I sure you don't want to talk about four day week Okay, you want to talk about four day was let's go ahead on a high four day weeks Controversial here and everywhere around the world tell us all about yours and he's up. We're working Yes, I read some books while I was on holiday. I came back and said to the team hey I'm thinking about doing this. What do you reckon on surprisingly? They went hell yeah Right, and so I said okay Clearly, I'm not going to accept a 20 percent reduction in revenue or profit We need to do five days working for but I'm not going to extend your hours. I could have done I could have said you know you do 35 hours over four days instead of over five days to work longer days I said I'm not going to do that because all the studies show if you give Your team a day a week they will Meet the challenge. So we eased in over six months for two months. We closed at three o'clock on a Friday Because everybody wants a Friday off right people saying like you know, do we do some people Monday off some people Tuesday everybody wants a Friday off So we literally closed the office on a Friday. We wrote to one person on the team on to cover Got a decent sized team. So I only have to do that right once every five months something like that And they get a day off in lieu And we've done it now for two years and since we've done that we've doubled revenue and the profit now I'm not saying we've done it because of a four day week that would be madness But it hasn't held us back probably I could have two and a half times revenue and profit if we did done a five day week What's the point in that? Honestly, well-being goes through the roof Well, I'm glad you qualified Glad you qualified at the start by the it's actually five days of work done in four not that it's just a day off And I think that's often that is that nuances meest often Yeah, so that's incredible results And presumably the the team is getting bigger and bigger talent. It's not hard to recruit or retain. Shall we put it out? And work from home is that four days in the office Yeah, it depends. We got a couple of fully remote just because that's the way it's kind of turned out But mostly we have folks two in two outs But to suit them, you know, if they're you know, they need to change for whatever reasons. I'm supposed to work It's done I think we need to treat people like adults until they don't deserve to be you know, and it's fairly easy enough to keep an eye on Funny that the team will call out Anybody who's dragging their feet. They'll make it very clear that that's not all right You know, we've got a great team great leadership team within it who lead by example So we're lucky, but we like to think that we've um, we've led that correctly And for us honestly, man, it's a godsend. I mean, I own the business. So sometimes Friday's a catch-up day for me But the team it's a four-day week And they were we were like dogs in those four days if you got an extra down the weekend to recover It's it it's okay. That was actually gonna be my next question, which is what we're doing for the day before that you don't do now Is it the chance to round the water cool up? What would have you given up? Yeah, I mean we have occasionally had to say You know, sometimes a conversation starts right and then more heads turn and before you know it There's like eight people having a conversation about like the world cup or something and occasionally just let's say a lot come on guys This is lunchtime stuff again treat people like adults. So if it's three minutes or five minutes then fine if it's 25 minutes We've got a problem but again, it's funny that happened fairly recently and The other some of the others who are not involved with that conversation Essentially grasp them up. They're like come on. That's not all right. Come on guys, you know, and you know, call them out on it And so and they're like yeah fair cop You know, it's easy to get caught up in it, and it's definitely the case that the better you treat people sometimes the better They want to be treated or they can sort of take them make a little bit But usually if you call them out on that they go You know fair enough. They know I look either I'll put it that way often it says through conversations And the chat in the coffee room though the create culture and and have you seen a change in culture off the back of the change to four days? Yeah, it's part of a cultural change when I I've called on my practice manager a couple of times recently her actual title is Empowerment and impact lead her name is Sharon. She joined us four and a half years ago And she has transformed the place because she is my integrator. She gets stuff done. I might have the ideas She will be like yeah, let's do it But here's how we're going to make it work and so I mean I'm a lucky man, right because I found her and I obviously look after her and treat her very well and pay her well And but she is as excited as I am about the building of something great and something that we are How do I've as opposed to building for financial reasons alone? So she is the one that has helped shape the culture and it's very much like this is what we're trying to do are you with us come with us? These are the kind of behaviors we expect somebody who works for us to exhibit anything else we will stamp on and we're not Bush overs right we'll stamp on it will stamp on it very quickly But we treat people like adults. I learned that from some good bosses early on and I think we've been able to Deliver it. So for the week is just kind of part of that but we you know go out and drink together. We Socialize we're very good at involving the team in what our plans are and he struggles with her with you know Experiencing or whatever so it's a little bit touchy-feely for a lot of people But I think it's working very well for us wonderful. I'm glad we chatted about that Drop that on you. No, not at all. I'm glad you did but Pete. It's been an absolute pleasure Hope to catch up with you in the UK or if you'd make it over to Australia at some point and yeah Look forward to watching a few of your online YouTube feeds. Thank you, mate. That really enjoyed chatting with you, mate, and thanks for having me Thanks for listening to this episode of Between meetings for more episodes and to subscribe to our series visit the net Wealth website iTunes Spotify or your favorite listening service and if you want to contact me or engage or discuss any of the topics Rise please find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or send me a private message. We hope you continue to the next episode