Tech Sanity for Advice Firms with Peter Worn of Finura Group

Welcome trusted advisors. This is the podcast where we explore what it really takes to build, grow and sustain a thriving financial planning business. Every fortnight you'll hear candid conversations with the leaders, innovators and trailblazers of our profession. People who have navigated the challenges, embraced the opportunities and are willing to share what they've learned along the way. If you're curious, ambitious and committed to raising the bar in advice, you're in the right place. Welcome back to the Trust of Advisor podcast. Today we're talking about something that can either quietly turbocharge your advice business or quietly strangle it, your technology and more specifically how to bring some tech sanity back into a world of noise, fads and very expensive mistakes. My guest is Peter Warn, co-founder of Finuro Group, an independent technology advisor and software firm that works exclusively with advice businesses and licensees. Peter's data is career as a power planner, has worked with hundreds of advice firms and now sits in that rare seat where he sees the patterns, the pitfalls and the genuine opportunities in advice tech and AI every single day. In this conversation we get really practical. We talk about why tech consulting can feel like the Wild West and the hidden conflicts you should be watching for with managed service providers, software vendors and AI agencies. You might just be rebadging cheap tools and selling them back to you at fire watering margins. How to sanity check AI projects, avoid FOMO and use Peters you only get to pick one thing, R.I. lens and squeeze the lemon approach before you add yet another app to your stack. And the difference between a genuine tech stack and what Peter calls a tech pile and the common duplications in task tools, communication platforms and file stories that quietly add risk and complexity without adding any value. Also the big fork in the road, staying on an industry platform versus moving to an enterprise CRM like Salesforce, Idenomics including the real implementation and maintenance costs that often get overlooked. And then document management realities, SharePoint versus dedicated tools, how co-pilot changes the equation and what good data hygiene actually looks like in a modern advice firm. And there's a big payoff if you listen right through to the end. Peter shares how buyers really look at your tech when you're preparing to sell, including why using weird and wonderful proprietary systems can hurt your valuation. Why your cybersecurity posture is the polished shoes test for a choirous and the red flags that tell him a firm doesn't have a tech problem at all. It has a leadership and business model problem and why in those cases he'll actually send them to a practice coach before you'll touch the tech project. So if you've ever wondered are we ever paying for tech, underusing what we've got or about to make it very expensive in a stake, this episode is going to give you much clearer, calm our way to think about it. Let's get into my conversation with Peter Warn. Welcome Peter Warn to the Trusted Advisor podcast. Thanks Rob, really good to be here. Really good to have you here. We met formally for the first time only a few weeks ago now at the Fest Patrick's annual conference in Sydney and we were both speaking at that event and I've seen you speak many times. You've been a fairly regular on stage at different events and I've always appreciated the kind of insight you've provided but in a really just calm down everyone type of approach the way you talk about technology which I really appreciated and when we got to meet for the first time, it was a great conversation we had then and I'm looking forward to having you this one today. Yeah, thanks Rob. I suppose as you can well imagine techs are really noisy world and lots of fads come and go and maybe as I've gotten a bit older I've probably learned that my role needs to be to tell people to calm down a little bit but at the same time, you know, I really want positivity. I mean tech is amazing. They've been there looking at how live now I can be in what they were 20 years ago but at the same time, I'm also really careful I don't like seeing businesses make mistakes they can avoid so that's probably something that keeps me passionate and I know something that keeps advisors passionate about their clients as well. So I think we're just of similar values from that point of view. Yeah, for sure. So for listeners who don't know you tell us about Frenure Group and what an independent technology advisor to advice firms does day to day. So Frenure Group has two parts to it. So we have a software development business which is building some apps to the industry which is really interesting and we have a services business which provides, as you said, consulting services to the IFA and loss and seed market. We've only been going five years and someone actually said to me that day, gee, I don't know why I know on it that done this before around technology and so my colleagues, we had a background doing X plan development so we all worked in another company a long time ago and then for a whole bunch of reasons we decided to start something new and I just said to the team that I felt that technology was becoming such a big part of an advice business's lives but there really wasn't an ecosystem of people that can help them get the best out of it from that perspective. So I thought why do we sort of look to create a model within the same way that an asset consultant provides a chief investment officer support model or something along those lines. Why don't we create a technology model to do that? And the critical element and what's unique about us probably compared to other technology consulting services is our firms pay us directly for what we do. We're not resellers of Microsoft or Salesforce or as other things, unlike our industry, Rob, the technology industry is riddled with conflicts and shelf space and volume payments and all these sort of things. And I think ultimately small businesses just want our practical advice. And I think the secret source for us is that all of us, including myself, have worked and advice at various times in our career. So my first job was a paraplanar in 2000 at some court bank. So that's how long I go back. So you are from the industry. Therefore your technology understanding is very domain specific, which is why it's a real strength clearly of your business and you in particular Peter and I know your colleagues are there as well. I met Simon Betchley, one of your colleagues at the its Patrick's conference as well. And Simon reminded me we first met talking about Olic. I reckon I don't know what that was, but that's like in the 2000s sometimes. Yeah. Simon's probably got a richer software background than even I do, but he spent a lot of time working with three working through 400 device businesses now in the last few years and same as Danny and the rest of the team. So you add up the collective knowledge or scar tissue or we've got to call it some real learnings there. So we're really blessed there. And I think technology is a bit like advice. You know, I'm in constant admiration for financial advisors who have to be across the general practitioners of the financial world that got to be across all the legislative issues, compliance, the investments, the clients, behaviors, the tech and run a business. And so that is so challenging. And even with tech, it is really hard for us to have a whole bunch of all rounders who have graded everything. So what we've really tried to do is build up a team who have areas of expertise. And I think one of the value adds that I think we add for our clients and things they tell us is it's nice that you can bring in the right people with a problem. And I think great advice to do that too. Yeah. Yeah. They have their diverse skill sets. There's a great credit to your firm that what you've been able to build there. So when we did a quick pre-episode chat last week, you made a point that tech consulting can be bit of the Wild West. It's perhaps not as regulated as we're used to in financial planning, as you know. So what conflicts of interest do exist in our space? You mentioned there a moment ago, just about technology and how there are things to be very aware when you're actually buying technology, when you're talking to vendors, what should advice firms watch out for when selecting a tech partner in that context about conflicts? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like everything. I think everyone has conflicts. It's how you disclose them. It's how you leave with them. So, you know, certainly if a business when they're approaching you, when they don't volunteer, what some of their conflicts are upfront. So we do that. And now about the neurosurgery slides, we talk about it software business. We talk about how we manage conflicts in that. That's always often a good red flag because I just think every, I mean, you have an FSG, which talks about how you manage your things. So I still wish it be the same. So that's probably this golden rule for us. But I think the nuances and the things that people need to be aware of. So let's talk about managed service providers, for example. So managed service providers are your IT guys. I like every better term that provide all the Microsoft and hardware support. Now, a lot of them are reminirated in different ways by providing volume to certain providers. So I came across an instance, I had recently joined the Board of the Business and Advice Business. And for some reason, this business wasn't using SharePoint. It was using some other weird and wonderful bit of infrastructure to store its data. And I just knew hands down this IT service provider was getting a kicker on it. So they were gone pretty quick. I can tell you after we discovered that. And the thing that was annoying to the advice was they were never told that they don't mind if they're something there. But when you're not told, it really frustrates people. So there's that side of it. They do resell hardware. So a lot of them get kickers for recommending certain laptops over others. So Lenovo HP, they provide incentives to resell providers, even like core to our IT guys. We have IT guys themselves that manage all that stuff. And they were trying to sell me some new laptop. And I said, guys, you're talking to the wrong guy. I'm not going to get it. I know what you're up to. And in other industries, this is how business gets done. But our industry is now different. And so I don't think it's not unreasonable that an advice to them wants to hold its suppliers to the same level of stand. It's that they have to adhere to. So that's probably the big one. They said of things that and I think for me, you're never going to get rid of those conflicts. Because in many cases, like managed service providers, often those conflicts hold their business models up altogether, a bit like the mortgage-breaking industry. Those commissions, those things are actually really important for them to be viable. But there are probably other areas where we find conflicts are not disclosed. So in the startup world in particular, we do come across increasingly where we do due diligence on startups who are looking to enter this space and sell software to advisors or industry people that they often don't disclose. There are other business interests. We often find that Software has been recommended by third parties to advisors and it's not been disclosed that that person's a shareholder or an investor in that business. Just those little human type things I suppose, Rob, which are generally pretty big red flags. Yeah, absolutely. Even that many service provider point you just made, that's a really good piece of insight that I think many people would not be at all aware of. In fact, I kind of had my suspicions to be honest because we've got an MSP like pretty much everyone does. And I was just get that sneaking suspicion. I'm thinking it doesn't sound always like it's thinking about what we need. There was something else going on here. I won't go into detail, but they're a great provider. They do a great job, Met Marvellous work and I won't say who they are, but they are doing a terrific job for us. But I did get the sense there was some other stuff going on there that we had to be mindful of and you've just probably pointed to the issue. So it's good to be aware of. And they're just strategies that often the big enterprise software companies use to great distribution. They incentivize their distributors to do things. And as I said, I have no problem with it. Just be upfront. The other thing that we must talk about because AI is the topic that everyone wants to hear about. You noted when we chatted, proliferation of AI agencies, building things that are often pretty much off the shelf elsewhere, but they're building something specific and if you like bespoke. What are the common ways you're seeing practices getting taken for a spin? And how do they sanity check the vendor claims? This is an area you're kind of very familiar with. I saw your presentation at the Fitzconference and this is kind of something you've really got your teeth into. So give everyone a bit of a sense of what they should be thinking about when they're thinking about how they deploy AI in their business. Yeah, so there's a lot in there. So the first part of the question really was around agencies. Yeah. So I'm not talking about AI up developers. So you're far no doubt those kind of people there. They're software developers in my opinion. We're here talking about businesses that effectively come to you and they say, hey, we can solve a really bespoke business problem that you've got using AI and we're going to build some technology for you to do that. That's kind of what they pitch. In some cases, there may be validity to what they're saying and that's fine. But in a lot of cases, what we actually find is all they are really doing is just configuring some low code third party apps and putting a bit of a sticker on it and selling it to you and saying, here's your full custom AI product. The realm that we are seeing the most proliferation of these approaches are easy and actually in marketing. So claiming that they can do automated lead generation, website scraping tools, you know, that sort of thing. And I suppose it makes sense because they are the areas where they are particular where it's not really industry specific, you know, to do those things you don't need knowledge of padded or an S.O.A. if you're an AI provider, for example. So they tend to sit more in that realm of marketing, productivity type tools, I would say. And what I have found is we've seen a number of businesses that have gone down those past in many cases signed up to 10, $15,000 a month type subscription fees and really all they're buying for a third party is a bit of software that might cost five, 600 bucks a month and it's been margined up heavily like and figure out. So we have to come across those instances. We've also come across instances of agencies who have built custom software because that's how they get paid is building custom software where something off the shelf would have easily done the job or they built custom software prematurely. So we often say AI is a way and it is a big long way and so a lot of features that I mean people were buying apps for Chatchy B2 not so long ago to upload PDFs and things now that stuff doesn't have the box. So we're big on saying don't go prematurely on some of this engine because that app you're spending money on will probably just be standard in six months time. And so that's probably the area we're just really caution our firms on and not because we don't want them to do things. But it's just that ultimately all of us are small business owners and you just don't have the capital to be throwing away money on things that are really not going to work from day one. So that's probably why. You know if you're a SAP 500 company then you can afford to lose a few million bucks on something that never sees a lot of day. Yeah. So the word of advice there is don't fall victim to FOMO just cool down a bit just make sure you're making careful decisions. What's your approach for cutting through the hype and helping people stay focused on what matters? So I think always be really clear on what's the likely return on investment for what's been proposed. And so that's often the garden rule and and even any business I wouldn't say cost is the big constraint. It's often time. And so that's the way we're going to do it. It's often time. And so my business partner, Aaron's got a great saying when a client's wasting a lot of time debating it as to what we should do and all the different initiatives. He'll often say guys you get to choose one. What's it going to be this year? We get to pick one thing. And that often sharpens your focus a lot. And you may find out that that marketing thing you thought would be really cool from an AI point of view is a lot less important perhaps than streamlining our review process to be something boring like that or you know cleaning up our client data. So we're ready for AI next year. All those sort of pieces. So I find that that's probably the foundational piece when it comes to where do we make AI investments? And how do we sort of do that? I think the golden rule for us is always make those AI decisions with the greatest proximity to your data. So we believe that in most of the enterprise systems that advice us use, whether it's Microsoft or Salesforce or in those global CRMs, there are already AI features in those platforms you're probably not using today. So we're really big on hey, well, let's just squeeze the lemon there for things that we're probably already paying for and we're not utilizing fully in almost earn the right. If we have proven beyond reasonable doubt that those solutions can't do that job, then we'll go and look for something else. So we still see a lot of businesses have never even touched co-pilot agents. Don't know how they work. And again, things that you can do for free run experiments. You can get people like us to help you get there faster and that's fine, but that's a time cost. It's not a software cost. It's not adding a new thing to the tech stack, which may or may not be there in three months time. It's actually just getting to learn and use the systems you already know really, really well. And I just think they are good investments of time and money because these are things you're going to be using for the next decade. I'd suggest. Yeah, that's great. That framework that's kind of almost mental model to say, if you get to choose one thing, what's the ROI thing that they said right at the start there, I think it's a great frame. To think about things and often use that internally when we talk about things we're looking at saying, if we could do just one thing, what would be the single greatest thing we could do that would move the needle the most and it does help narrow the focus on what's the best ROI and I love that. So really think it's a great takeaway. And that point you just made again, then about squeeze the lemon you've got because actually a lot of what's already there, the people aren't really utilizing and that's true of almost every technology that people have in their business. They're not maximizing what they already have and they're looking for something else and you've got this great line about tech stack versus tech piles. What are the most common duplications you're seeing people are going off and tried to solve another problem probably could have been solved with what they already had. We've got teams and zoom people using for virtual calls like this one people are using Trello and planner, you know, Microsoft got planner and Trello is very commonly used and so. How do you unwind people in that tech pile space when they've kind of gone but bolting all these things on where that possibly could have been a bit more streamlined. Yeah, I should say was my colleague Danny that came up with tech pile, I think in a in a moment of frustration, a while back, it's just caught on. Is there a tech pile emoji? I know there's a pile emoji. I think she might use the poor emoji. Yeah, I think so. What's a pile a pile is just a bunch of stuff that's put together with a logical go, you know, my kids room right it would be a pile and so I think a pile happens generally a tech pile happens because either people are just left to their own devices and what I mean devices are meant to you know they've got a find a way to solve a problem. So it played a role in this in the eastern states, particularly where ever had to rush home and they just I don't know that had more time maybe to just sort of explore different apps and things that they could use the cell problems and when we meeting new client I love to walk into their office and not just the front nice bit I want to see the whole office and I'll go around I'll just take little mental screenshots of what people's are on people screens it just tells me what people are using. And it's just amazing because if you were to see that look carefully and you saw one day walk past and someone had trello open and so I was well why isn't that hang on how did that happen but if they're home you don't see that. So that's probably those things but you're quite right the tech duplication is definitely probably more in the realm of the productivity apps that people use so that definitely in the realm of task management workflow and communication. There may be reasons where businesses have maybe merged and we haven't had the courage yet to get one team off another and that's a lot of work we do Rob it's a bit like marriage counseling or something like that where you got to get to businesses to agree on one and we're brought into the counselor to work and playing and that happens a lot post merge I would say where we go oh what's having with the tech so those things are really obvious ones for us and the reason why we try to get rid of that duplication is it's not even a costing because often these tools aren't super expensive. It's a complexity change management thing for us is secure from a data point of view so they're all the reasons we often go hey trello versus planet it doesn't really matter which one you're on but we've got to have good reasons why we went with one over the other is probably the main one certainly not cost but equally we have found instances in many cases we've almost paid for some of our justified air consulting fees by people having excess licenses on systems that never looked at before they're one very very large client we should have tried to do that. We're a large client we should have charged them an hour or I think we basically covered two X our costs because this was a very large company but their actual managed service provided was charged in almost 300,000 a year more than they were supposed to do and they picked it up it's just the whole story you know businesses tenses just accept the reality as it is each year and just say oh that was the fees. last year. Let's just keep playing the same next year and they don't look at these things. We also find Rob Verike businesses can produce a itemized data set of all of the software they use, the licenses they have, who are their licenses assigned to and what's the billing cycle for those licenses. That is a really important piece to do. I need to track the replication assistance, but also SaaS companies as you probably worked out, they're pretty clever with how they do their renewals and things like that. And often these things just tick over annually before you have a chance to even do that as well. So we don't just want to see a line item on zero. We want to see an itemized list of everything that's been used and also the usage of those tools. You would have a reader of business books and management books when we were chatting there at the conference and we were talking about different books and I saw you putting your head up for things that I've read that you've read. So we kind of are on the same wavelength about things that were kind of interest us about productivity and how to improve business in general. I mentioned the Clayton Christensen book, Innovators Delimmer and how he talks about this jobs to be done concept, which I think many people have heard of. How do you map the core jobs in an advice practice? You've got document storage, you've got plan production. There's a whole host of different functions, if you like, that have to be met by some form of technology, hopefully supporting it. How do you stop people just going for the shiny object? Going for that shiny tool, it looks great. That doesn't really solve the real problem and go back to that. What are we trying to solve for here? What are the core jobs and how do we actually make that the most streamlined and efficient that we can? Tell us about how you go through that with the practice. Yeah, so you're quite right. The jobs we've done framework has been with us from day one at finerow. It's something we certainly anchor ourselves to. The main reason was that we sort of identified that despite the fact that every advice business has different value propositions and different ways of doing things that fundamentally we all kind of do the same things, only because we're highly regulated. So there's often not a choice. By definition, those jobs to be done are quite consistent across a business. It's just that we've literally seen thousands of different iterations of how those jobs are done. Those iterations are not often deliberate decisions. They're just legacy. They're just people with over time have all had their little hands on the process and found a way to do things. Our role in that is to really boil those jobs to be done down to their essence, what are those core things? Identify what is the process and who should be doing those jobs? And if it's not a who, it's what what system should do it? And make out decisions that way backwards, rather than people can't we do us go, oh, is a dynamic service a sales force? What do we do? That's not the right question in our opinion. And there's also another set of jobs to be done that often doesn't get considered. And that's the clients job to be done. So what are the jobs to be done for the client? So that's jobs that they need to do as clients, their jobs that we need the clients to do for us, like signing things and sending us things and look at all of those things in their totality. Because that way we can often make some better decisions about, well, rather than replacing a bit of software, maybe we can just kill a process all together because we just don't need it. It's just of no value anymore. We don't even know why we do it. One of the things I do, I'm on a few boards and I always say to the CEO, is look how much time do you spend putting your other power points to these boardmen? I'll get some answers and I go, can we kill that? I'm more than happy for you to send us the Excel spreadsheet and a nice little whiteboard with some screenshots and a bit of a commentary or a loan video. That process is not required. So I think it is a business-wide discipline. I don't think you need a tech consultant necessarily for that mindset and that philosophy. I think that's something that should be in the DNA of your business owner. But they are constantly questioning those jobs to be done in the business and working through that all the time saying why we do it. And you hear that all the time, well, I asked the question why. It's really why we're doing that job and if we still need to do that job, why we're doing it that way. Yeah, to great framework that jobs to be done thing, I think because when you think about it, and as you say, you've brought that approach to everything you do in the business, consulting world and technology to be able to look at those component parts of the device process because we are a real estate industry. Therefore, everyone's doing essentially the same things. There is plan and production, there is document stories, there is product comparisons, there is cash flow modeling, all these component parts can be isolated to say, okay, what is the right method to get those jobs done? As you say, but you also make a really good point there. Peter, which is about the client's jobs to be done too because there's documents signing and I'll just reflect on the fact you said when businesses merge, a business merge with us a few years ago now and they had docky sign was their primary digital signing tool. And we had another version we're using Adobe and for a good while I reckon at least a year or more we were using two versions because there's habits that have been formed and it took a little while to navigate which of those we're going to work with moving forward and I don't think either of them is probably the best solution now even so it's always challenging that question as to what we're doing while we just look at that way. So that's a really good framework and something else you spoke about when we chatted last week, you talked about this first fork in the road that businesses should consider when they're thinking about whether they stay with the main-state industry advice platform, keep it tight, stick with one, where they go bigger and go with a sales force or a Microsoft Dynamics CRM. There's a few in the market now on both sides. How do you decide which side of the fork a firm is on whether they stay tight, main-state platform versus starting to branch off into maybe another more CRM-centric business model if you like for technology? It is a critical question and so one of the things we really try to do up front before we start work with any businesses gets to know the owners quite well and we're not business coaches but we do need to know where the business is going strategically because tech should be in service of that not an inhibitor and so if a business owner looks at me and the eyes is yeah look it's probably unlikely someone's going to succeed me I'll probably sell this business the next five to six years that's going to inform heavily some of the tech decisions we make for that business which may be our optimal for the next day-to-day like there's probably always a better way in those things but I see it as our job to make that business sell ready potentially. I would hate for something that we would recommend that business to do to make that sale process more challenging or impact the valuation of those things and you're an acquireer of businesses, surely you must look when you're doing your due diligence look at a business and work out this is going to be hard because they're just using all this weird and wonderful stuff that I've never heard of how we're going to migrate them to our operating system. Yeah if anything it's actually almost the benefit of there being a really dominant platform in the technology space in Australia I was talking to another guest on the podcast that is coming up in a week or so now about the same question and he's looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the technology industry in the Australian market and he said perhaps the strengths because he was struggling to find one because you know you get people going off to the US and seeing all weird wonderful tech ideas trying to come back to the Australian market thinking there's lots of things can be done but he said perhaps the one strength is that there is at least a pretty uniform approach to how people are running tech so when you are integrating firms unless they've really gone off the reservation there is usually a consistent approach to how technology is being run so that's an interesting observation that you know we've got to try and find ways to bring firms together but never get that technology question and knowing for well in advance as you say what the intention is for the business because that obviously is a big bearing on how you would advise them in terms of what they do on the tech front. Is there a threshold there as well that you think about over the fork in the road? So let's say the business owner can't answer that question within a conviction then you start to look more at the size and scale of the operation and so we still have this view that most people in any role can maybe handle two or three systems well to sort of know them really really well and I'm yet to meet many people that for example who are all over Salesforce and all over explain and our experts on both and we know Pat quite well Collins SBA and you know he's probably learning new things about Salesforce every single day right and he's been in a long time you could say the same thing about anyone that works with Microsoft Dynamics or HubSpotter and things so I feel that traditionally smaller businesses probably do struggle to use some of those tools now there is some interesting work going on with a few providers to sort of somewhat dumb down some of those capabilities to make them easier to adopt for a business but even if you do that you know Salesforce and Microsoft as much as they may look superior to some of the industry specific tools they are still very complex piece to get your head across and I mean for a real user a person is really going to use this thing every day and so I would say there is a law of diminishing returns for a small business going too heavy into those enterprise serons because firstly they'll never maximize their full potential that's probably the first thing so they may just be overpaying for something they don't need I think more importantly I just feel that it will just create an added level of complexity that will never get the return on investment they're looking for these tools have been built for companies with hundreds of thousands of employees millions of customers you know as much as they we think we're really special in our industry we're not in that realm where I do find good implementations of those CRMs is probably in two carriers so definitely where businesses have quite sophisticated marketing lead generation strategies where they're quite bigger businesses and they've got lead management they've got sophisticated engines that run in those things and they are great because they're really really well classed that and the industry tools don't do that well so if you big on client experience and lead management then you're probably getting up there the other areas I think if you're multidisciplinary if you are accounting lending financial planning it's really hard to get those tools to talk to each other so we almost see those tools as like the canopy over the top and they were going to have their individual pieces then this is just a scale thing I suppose where if it makes sense for a business of your size to have an in-house person who can run those systems well and understand them and you can afford that then you will get benefit a lot of firms probably buy things like dynamics and sales force and they underestimate the maintenance that I budget for it doesn't come with the support package that we would expect into fact, it can be almost double what you spend on licensing just to keep these things maintained. We'd be like yachts. We've labelled this episode tech sanity and that's I think you just nailed it on that one. That's a really useful way of thinking about how to actually approach the technology question just to give people some sort of guideposts to where they should be thinking and perhaps just be more intentional about what your business is where it's at and what it's most going to get. So, don't go too far too fast because as you say, even the software they have probably isn't being fully utilized. So it's a pretty good guidance right there. So let's go back and talk about AI again for a second. You were seeing a lot of advice firms, you're meeting with a lot of firms and seeing what they're doing, beyond basic file notes and doing the file noting, what do you see in its getting real traction out there in the market right now? So in terms of advice business, definitely on the marketing content generation site, I'm seeing a lot of advisors using AI to help avoid the late page anxiety that we have when we're asked to write an article or a blog or prepare for a podcast there, I say. Yep. And so I think it's wonderful for that. And so I'm loving seeing more and more content on LinkedIn for advice firms. That's great because we've got to compete with the AI Slop of the FinTech influencers right. So the more we do, that's actually credible content. Let's keep going with that. So that's been excellent. Many seeing firms using for their investment research, using sort of more research agents maybe rely a little less on what the fund managers are providing us and use those as inputs, but actually do some of our own market analysis and come up with some own charts of our own that we want to tell a story. And I remember even back when I was in advice business, my dad was an advisor to it. I remember he always had two charts and his office he had the big Vanguard one. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen that one. That was awesome. And I think perpetual had a really good one as well. But you could sort of build those near yourself and do ones that are specific for your business and your brand identity. So I'm loving to seeing firms trying those ideas. And the other area that I've been positive about things, I'm loving seeing firms who are using agents and tools to help communicate with clients more effectively. So we have a habit of putting jargon in our industry and our communications with clients. And one of our private wealth firms we look after they have a lot of very wealthy clients in the many, many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And they reminded me the other day, a lot of our clients were just small business owners that sold their panel, beating shop to a roll up for $100 million. They're not sophisticated people. They don't want to read about sharp ratios and all these other bits and pieces. So they are using AI to help communicate with those people more effectively. So I think they're great examples. In terms of advice specific, I still think we have a long way to go before we're ready for full SOA type things. And I would only say that because the regulatory risk, the risk of hallucinations is there. And I would say the risk reward ratio is probably not optimal for that right now. I just think I read this morning that a King's Council and a solicitor have been sent to the Federal courts sent them to the Law Society for a slap on the risk for AI hallucinations in a Federal courts submission here in Australia. That's starting to happen. I, dear, we're going to have some of that next year in advice in Australia, unintended consequences and now look to be fair, those mistakes were made by paralegals by younger people, but that's what's going to happen. So we are sort of encouraging businesses to sort of keep that maybe out of the stuff that's going to probably get you in trouble with the goes wrong. Only because there's so many other areas that you can actually get value from that aren't going to cause your problems. The big one that I'm really hoping to see more of and I think the enterprise CRM's will lead the way here is on data management. So what I mean by that is that a lot of the more contemporary CRM tools and now have AI capability that'll sort of make it easier to ingest data, update client information, just be better at that and structure data better. And a lot of work we do, Rob is just cleaning up crap data for businesses and so AI is pretty good at that. So I know some people are doing some good stuff with dynamics and sales source to sort of update client data more effectively and have less humans doing that part of the role. So honestly, if business isn't solved that, we are so far ahead of the game, compared to where we were three years ago, just on that alone. Yeah, it's great. When you presented at the Fitzconference, you showed us some workflows that you've created using co-pilot, which is now, you know, they're in a valuable and in fact, even at the F-Triple A Congress a couple of weeks back when someone was on stage asked who was using AI, all the hands, you know, pretty much went up. And what were you using? Most number of hands was for co-pilot. So people are actually adopting co-pilot now that it has really come along in leaps and bounds because I think as soon as it was launched, it was pretty underwhelming at the time versus the retail competitor, Chatsy BT, even though they were using the same LLM supposedly. But co-pilot has come a long way since then and you showed us some pretty cool workflows you've helped build. Can you just share two or three of your favourite workflows that you're working really well in practices? You've helped create for businesses to get them a little more efficient on the way they process their client files? Yeah. So if we had built some, effectively agents on co-pilot, which are basically those people know what the agent really is, it's just an advanced prompt with a bit of workflow that's got a very specific job to do. So one of the challenges with using the generic chatbot type things to do jobs like even just the generic co-pilot interface is that it's going to be different every time. So what you want to do is build some repeatability. So what we do is we look to build some agents with a specific for tasks and you can share them across the business and everyone uses the same thing. So we've definitely used them for creation of file notes. So we have had quite a few businesses who have maybe tried some of the off-the-shelf file notes tools that are out there, but those costs can add up quite quickly for some businesses or they just don't want to add another thing to the text back so they sort of say, can I do it in co-pilot? And certainly it does cost money to develop and deploy these things, but for larger businesses that make sense to do this in-house. So that's definitely a value. We've had success building things like implementation checklists and reports, so the ability to consume a statement of advice and give a really structured implementation checklist to your back office team in order to a workflow and then even be able to create some workflow off the back of that through the power platform, creating tasks and things inside of the Microsoft environment has been really, really successfully adopted as well. And the other big one is standardisation of power planning requests. So larger businesses often struggle with this element and so what we allow is the advisors of sort of credit agents which will ingest file notes, technical strategy content and some modeling and will allow the advisor to almost just verbally dictate in what they want to happen with the client and there's advisors of all different ages and skills. And so even if they provide quite unstructured guidance, it will then put that into a nice structured file note, power planning request. So third party power planning and then actually don't have to do the plan with some level of confidence. So for me, they are really good useful things and why we're doing sort of specialised configuration. It's just that every practice has its own way of working. And so there are some cases where we can just use AI because it is just simple to use AI than try to get the practice to change everything on that. And what we're finding with those businesses, once they adopt those things and get it going and I think it takes a few months to get those things fully adopted. Then they start saying, "Oh, what else can we do with that?" Or, "All right, we come back and talk to them a few months later and they've built some other things they're trialing." And we go, "It's kind of cool. It's like letting you ride a bike. You just need mum or dad to just hold the handlebars for a little while at the start and then eventually they're flying down the hill." Yeah, yeah. I love that last one. In fact, all those three make so much sense, especially that last one you just mentioned around the paraplanning request and having an advisor, essentially dictate in their thoughts as to what they want to have happen and it ingests the workpapers and actually puts together a pretty neat paraplanning request because there is quite a bit of time and effect that goes into that work for an advisor or an associate to an advisor preparing that for a paraplanning to write. So let's talk about document management. It's a big one. Document management. You've mentioned SharePoint more than once in this call. How should firms think about this knowing it's already included in the Office 365 suite SharePoint? There are also other enterprise grades, business solutions like we're using. We've used Box now since 2017. So eight years and it's only highly sophisticated enterprise grade document management system. It's got all the things we would want and when we were first into SharePoint in 2017, it wasn't where it is today. I haven't really spent the time going back because I haven't got a technology. Still to do it anyway, but comparing SharePoint to Box, for example, because Box comes at a cost, SharePoint's included. So it's clearly a decision point for businesses to make sure they're making the right choice for the document management. So how do you think about that with businesses that you're consulting to around document management? The main advantage of getting people onto SharePoint now is the way Copilot works specifically. So most of the Copilot features will only perform with their best if your data is inside of SharePoint. So simple as that. So using the more advanced version of the Copilot now, we can basically come through all of your SharePoint information to get context on the job that you're trying to do. So that in itself has probably been a great push to get some firms who frankly, we still have found people using data on premises and also as a win-win of things happening. So don't beat yourself up over that box. And it's people still using Dropbox and please don't use data that sources which aren't domestic or Australia. There's a whole bunch of things like that. So it's given people that nice it'll push along to start using SharePoint out from that point of view. I would also say too, depending on how it's configured, that the collaboration features inside of Microsoft are important. So obviously by using SharePoint, it's going to make co-authoring of documents and all those things work a lot more effectively on that side. The main tricks and things to be careful of is make sure you structure your SharePoint data correctly. So for example, for Nura, we have certain clients where confidential is super important to them beyond anything else. So we'll have separate SharePoint structures to them. Just to make sure our co-pilot doesn't access that, we advise businesses are supposed to have certain information like salaries and sensitive employee data in a separate SharePoint folder structure. So co-pilot's configured to not. do that. So, and even the fact you can do that with the Microsoft suite just gives you a lot of power and flexibility on that side. The other big one is backup and recovery. So, I've only had one incident where this happened, but I completely butchered a report with a client we had, it was just a stuff that happened. And I didn't realize that Aaron's just said, "Oh, now I can pretty much go back any second of the day and recreate what you did because we're way ahead of that thing, SharePoint built." So, that sort of been built for resilience to the data. It was pretty incredible when you see it happen and it validates your decision. You went that way. Like, I think for you or anyone else who's using box or any of those sort of really superior tools themselves, I mean, box works particularly well with Salesforce, right? So, that's, I see a lot of that. And so, maybe for you, the benefits of that actually outweigh any disadvantages in not being on SharePoint. So, it's like everything. It's going to be case by case, nothing's going to be perfect. But certainly, if you don't fit in that category, if you're just pretty much using Microsoft and X-Plan or IntelliFlower Summing, then you should be on SharePoint. No questions asked. Yeah, there you go. Everyone's a bit of free advice and good advice at that. And you're right, box does integrate extremely well with Salesforce, which is why we went there in the first place. And speaking of all things CRM, when we chatted, you talked about this kind of a bit of the Lego reality of off-going for Enterprise CRM. And you said it there a few minutes back now as well, just about be prepared for what you're getting yourself in for because it's implementation, configuration, ongoing maintenance. How should owners who are thinking about that budget so they don't get surprised about what they're up for when they decide to go to the path of using a CRM? And it could be Finn's 365 because obviously they're in the market with Dynamics. It could be what we're doing where we've practised the moment and looking at our alternatives as well. So, yeah, just so the people aren't surprised when they decide to go away from X-Plan as the Beall-Endal. What should they prepare themselves for? Yeah, so I think the first thing is that let's just use that scenario that I want to lead to X-Plan and I want to go to Microsoft Dynamics, whether it's Finn 365 or something else. The reality is that you will not have all the same features in Kpeville, if you do have with X-Plan. So you will still need pieces of the puzzle to produce the advice. So whether it's Salesforce or Dynamics, they would never be built to be advice tools. And we have absolutely same businesses go off the rails and things fall over who have tried to almost rebuild X-Plan inside of Salesforce or those things, it becomes really complicated. So we're actually quite big on potentially say, look, I want to move into that from an enterprise point of view, but I'm probably going to keep some industry specific tools like an X-Plan or an advisor logic or something to do the modeling and the research and the advice creation because the pain of trying to rebuild that inside of X-Plan just doesn't make sense for us. And just try to get those two to talk to each other. So that's probably the first thing just from a mental model point of view around that. When it comes to, if I've made my decision that I really want to go with an enterprise CRN, then obviously there's two ways you can do it. You can go by your own directly and just configure it. We do work with larger companies, some ASICs, this is ones that have gone down that path. You are looking at $300,000 as a guide to configure those things to get them working for you. And that's not with us. That's the actual third party in Salesforce developer. So Salesforce comes to you, yeah, it is like Lego in the sense that you have to pay and probably worse because it doesn't come with the instructions. And that's where that sort of whole thing about building with the end of mine is really hard because you don't really know what you want. It'd be like building a house without an architect. If you keep changing your mind all the way through, it's easier to be like that. So a lot of the work we'll do with clients is just go, okay, if we're going to go to that path, what does it need to look like? And how do we craft a set of requirements that the builder, the Salesforce configure can go and do it and not run off the rails and costs? So that's a big one. The smoother path, I think for businesses who aren't in that 250 employee plus realm is to get something kind of 80% of the way pre-configured for someone. So Fin365 has done that really well with Dynamics, practised with Salesforce, kept Tegra, I've got one. And that's kind of working on one now too, which are looking really promising as well. And I think there'll be a few of these. And there's a lot of them in America that do that as well. So they'll just provide businesses with I just think three quarters of the job done. I've said the configuration. The only problem we find is that remaining 25% to get what you want to be 100%, could actually cost a lot still to get it there. So we have consultant affirms that have bought one of those tools, pre-configured and ended up having to spend quite a lot of money to get everything they wanted built it anyway as well. So every case is somewhat different. But I think going in eyes what open about what it will and what it do and be accepting that there will be some trade-offs in terms of what your full capability will be. And I would also say too, like dealing with Salesforce, I don't mind picking on big companies because they can work with it. I think they're pretty relentless ruthless sales organizations. I've actually dealt with some Salesforce customers who have been almost exhausted by the process that they just give in and sign up. I don't know how they go about it, but it's just not what we're used to in this industry. I think it's not relationship. Let's put it that way. And so I've just seen firm sign up to some pretty silly terms directly with Salesforce that they need to. One case we saw where there was a three-year contract signed annual payments in advance and the business was still 19 months in and still not using it. So they were still paying for it, just completely an experience on that side of it and Salesforce didn't care. And they said, "Well, if you don't pay your bill, we'll see you." So I would say some of the advantages of those third-party relationships, if they're going to manage the Salesforce contract for you, I think that's a win personally. I've got to grow a piece of advice too, I think. I just say going direct, you are dealing with a very big organization that isn't really thinking about the end user experience always. It's out of the box and we'll try and tell you what we can get you to agree to. So cautionary tale for everyone who's thinking about going down that space. You talked about there, just thinking about getting that last 25 percent. People get most of what they want pretty good figured, but they just can't get that last bit. You talked about this ROI quadrant set up the cost versus impact quadrants. What's high cost, low impact, what is low cost, high impact? Obviously that's the ideal scenario. Can you talk us through the decision-making framework that you bring to the table there and making sure people are making the right decisions around the ROI they might get from the investment they make? Yeah, so it's a pretty foundational consulting concept, I suppose, where you work with a client to decide, "Here's all the things we'd like to do. Here's all the things we need to do. Here's what the costs will be. Here's what the benefits will be of doing those things." And we did that process firstly because a lot of firms don't have the necessary experience to understand firstly what the costs are. It also then allows us and the firm to stress test the benefits. So to really say, are we capturing those benefits? There was one example where a CEO rightly said, "Well, that's great. It's going to save us a thousand hours. What are we doing in those thousand hours?" And I'm like, "Well, that's up to you." I said, "I can create the time, but I know humans by M1. And if you free up an hour of my day, I'll fill it with some crap." That's for sure. So I sort of feel that even if those benefits are not hard dollars and there's two types, hard savings, just strict cost savings and just capture it. The softer side of it is the hours and capacity side. And I think all we really want to do is to call those out to the businesses to say, "This is actually what you should be tracking." And just saying, "Well, if we're not doing that anymore, what have we replaced that time with?" My dad, a long time ago, taught me about Parkinson's law. This sort of work will always expand. I'll keep by the time I've loaded for it. He was a small business owner all his life. So I think he's just driving nuts. And I think it's true. It's human nature. We do someone a week to do a job. It'll take a week. And so I do worry a little bit that we don't do a good job capturing those things. And one of these we like to do is we do have on-game relations with our clients. So we'll often track that stuff and sort of say, "What has happened to that time?" And this is probably the big unknown with AI, right? You know, all these advisors that are saying they're saving hours a week doing fire notes. Are they seeing more clients? Are they doing more meetings? And I think as a business owner, I would put it to you that, let's just come up with one metric that we want to track on the other side that proves whether we're doing a better job. And whether that's our revenue or our, I like the idea of average meetings per week per client, per advisor. Because I just think advisors and a lot of businesses don't do enough meetings for clients. If we increase the number of meetings that advisor does per week with client by three, for example, that's 120 extra meetings a week. Now I just think as an industry, that's a great way to improve our capacity. So maybe it's as simple as that. That's gold. I agree with you, it's a great metric to track is that meetings per week, average meetings per week per advisor, because I was actually just reminded as you were saying that of a research report that Mochitz has put out talking about the major drivers of advisor productivity. And client facing time was one of the top four. And just putting people in front of their clients more often, giving them support to do that is a critical lever. So getting people in front of their clients more often, meeting times is a good one. Now I've been up and talk to you all day Peter. I'm going to ask you two more questions because I've got to respect your time here because I love this conversation. When I first put a question set together, it was a long, long lesson. I thought I'll be here with three hours for Peter, but I'll ask you two more if that's okay. Sure. The first one is about M&A. People are out there looking at acquiring firms, but also there's firms, as you mentioned earlier, they're thinking about, well, I don't have a solution here and internal succession. I don't have the next generation leader coming through. I am going to be looking to at some point sell. They might be in their 50s. There might be a couple of years away thinking about how do I prepare my business as best it can be to sell to someone? How should they think about setting standards around technology, knowing they're going to sell at some point to make themselves more attractive and perhaps more requirements through the tech choices they've made? It's going to be a popular opinion, but it's probably going to be or intake your technology that you sit on towards the most commonly used ones. So a lot of businesses that may be explain. Only because that's their platform. They've got a lot of experience migrating, licensees in particular. If they're licensed by someone else with to explain the consequences. do and explain migrations every day. And I just think from an integration point of view, it will tick a lot of boxes for an acquireer to go, okay, I'm really comfortable with that. Also from a data security and all the other things point of view, if you are using something we've been wonderful no one's ever heard of. So right now we've got a live engagement with a couple of clients who are acquiring a business at the moment that has prior to technology. So they haven't spent a lot of money with us to do due diligence because rightfully their board has said we don't want to inherit a problem that we're on the hook for a tech point of view. So there's all those little things that you go, gee, was it really worth building that custom CRM because now you've got to get people like us coming in, poking around and it may not end well. So I just think there's a lot to be gained by that. And then obviously I think the other important elements too, just getting the house in order with how the Microsoft Environment is locked down and you cyber security processes and standards as well. So cyber security issues can bubble away in the background before they come to light. And so if I was acquiring businesses right now, I'd want to see how long have they been hearing to the essential aid for what's their track record on this. And even as a business, I would be documenting those things at a board level, having a almost a paper trail of this is what we've been doing on cyber for the last years. I don't know, it's not going to get you better price necessarily for your business, but bloody hell, it takes some risk off the table, doesn't it? Bit like other things. One of my teachers always said you've got to polish your shoes because generally if people will assume if your shoes are polished, they'd a lot of other stuff in your life's in order. I think the cyber is a good one for that that you can actually show the cyber stuff. You're going to be pretty confident as an acquired ago. Gee, well, I reckon the HR stuff's going to be pretty good. Like, you know what I mean? It's that sort of thing. So I just think there's a lot of benefit there. I totally agree. In fact, I was listening to a podcast this morning on my morning run, which is why my face is all red. I was listening to Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy and he was interviewed by Shane Parrish. He was the Knowledge Project podcast and brilliant podcast. Yeah, that's on my wait list. We'll listen to that one later today. It's a cracking episode. I'll give you one little tip we shared in that podcast. He said, "If you turn up to buy a car from a private seller and you knock on the door to the seller and you've had a look at the car, it looks good. You know, it looks at the body working and we're thinking that you knock on the door and a female vicar answers the door. You're probably going to be prepared to pay the price that she's asking or maybe even a touch more. If you knock on the door and the cyber opens and you're underpads, you're probably not going to pay the same dollar." So it's just that human judgment, that heuristic, I suppose it is. As you said, like Peter showing his shoes, because it's just a heuristic people used to determine, are they well organised? Is it something of value that I can rely upon? I like the heuristic. We all do it. We all make judgment calls about what we. Because we're trying to ascertain is this a real thing and cyber security would be a perfect way of indicating, is this firm in good order because they've been following essential A and they've got that nailed down. It's a pretty good indicator. I would think that they are well in order in the way they run their business. So yeah, it's a good one to think about for people and note out you're doing these DD exercises for firms when they're looking to make a position. So one more question for you, the last one. When is tech the wrong lever? What are the signs that perhaps the business has got a leadership or a business model issue that they think technology is a problem? And when do you refer to a practice coach instead of a tech project exercise? It happens more than you think and that's probably just been a bit of accumulated wisdom on our part to sort of identify those things. And that's side of why we've had to really consciously hire quite mature experience, people in a business who can pick up on those things because it's got instinct. The red flags are that they've actually tried some other things in the past from a tech perspective and it hasn't worked. And I will often ask the question, have you worked with other tech consultants before? I've done a tech project to tell me about how they went. And just a very general question. And that answer will use it to tell me everything I need to know. And it's not to be critical of the business. It's just to say, hey, look, I've seen lots of businesses work with that vendor or that company and had great outcomes. And you will often hear stories, well, I went to these guys and we tried these guys and didn't work. And you sort of go, okay, sooner or later the mirror has to come into the equation. And they are very, really purely tech issues. They are always people issues. And I know they are business. If we don't have the people thing right, we'll never be successful. So that is a question that is challenging one because sometimes you have to put your big boy pants on and talk to the business owner. But I do try to talk to them as a business owner and go, man, I'm just picking up on some stuff. And I think to be fair, we don't want to start a project with a client where it's destined to fail from the start. That's not good for us all for them. It's not enjoyable. You know, it's a terrible way to make money. And we don't have to. We don't have to run a business. In the summary, there's probably certain clients that come to you Rob that you just know you can't help. So, but what I would say is we have a wonderful network of consultants and people out there in the industry that I think nailed this stuff that we gladly refer to. And it goes both ways. There's plenty of consultants who go, hey, they are so tech issues. So I'm having dinner actually in Melbourne tonight with the group of them tonight. We catch up quite a bit. We have a little private WhatsApp going. And there's definitely a lot of collective knowledge in there. I'm sure there is. But the thing that you know, it's us is we actually really care about these businesses. But we have all learned that we can't be successful unless the conditions are right. And so I had a prospect actually the other day who almost was apologising to us because they decided to pause a project to June next year. But they had some critical people that she's blow up. But I was so pleased to hear they'd brought in a consultant who I know really well. He's good at managing those situations. This is going to help him through it. And I said, make don't apologize. You've actually just gone straight to the top of the list of the client I want to work with because you've shown the self-awareness today. This is going to work. So we're all business owners in the day. And I'd like to think that if someone felt that way about working with my business, I'd rather than tell me. Yeah, absolutely. As I said before, there is lots we could talk about today more than we've covered. But in the interest of your time, Peter, I just want to say it's absolutely delight talking to you. You are a very clear thinker and communicator on this issue. And I think people who are wanting to kind of navigate this big question around technology and AI and what systems should we use and should we go see around this is an absolute gold episode. So I really appreciate taking the time to join me today on the trust that applies to podcasts. Thanks Rob. Thanks for putting tech on the agenda. Always appreciate it and would love to come back some more in the future. Thanks again Peter, much appreciated. Thanks for tuning into the trusted advisor. Hope today's conversation brought you new insights inspiration for growing your business. 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