Transcript

Matt Heine: Hi, and welcome to this episode of Between Meetings. Today we've got a guest that will be very well known to many of you. By background, he's a professional footballer, most recently the CEO of the AFA, and now he's sitting on a number of advice boards. It is, of course, Brad Fox. Welcome Brad.

Brad Fox: Good day, Matt. How are you?

MH: Wonderful. Now we were just chatting and wondering how we were actually going to keep this podcast to 30 minutes but we'll do our best. There's a lot to cover.

I think before we start, do you want to just give a bit of flavour to the things that your working on at the moment, and I guess why you're in better place perhaps, to talk about some of the things we're going to talk about.

BF: Thanks, Matt. I guess I have now what people call a portfolio career. I got a range of things going on. I've crowded my business called SmartBrave Consulting. It's all about courage; courage in decision-making, courage in strategic planning, courage to take a step, take an action despite the feat that might be behind it. I'm sitting on some financial planning practise boards. A couple of boards of advice as well. One in the tech-space that supports financial advice practises. I'm also on ASICS Financial Services and Credit Panel. And this is where the "boos" should come from the audience so that's the panel that adds a peer review element into what suspensions an adviser should receive if they have breached the law.

MH: Right, that's an interesting one that I wasn't familiar with. Is that a well-represented board?

BF: There's about 20 people appointed to the panel, it's only had three hearings so far. This came into play right at the end of last year. I got to sit on the very first one, very complicated one. I reckon it's a useful process from my one experience in that it does bring some real peer experience into the hearing and they can put background and context around how an adviser might've made those decisions, why they might've gone that way with their advice, and it brings nuances that ASICS team don't have because they haven't had the experience of the coal-face.

MH: Is this for the worst of the worst cases?

BF: Yeah. We're not brought it for the vanilla or for the clear black-and-whites. It's the difficult cases.

MH: Okay, well that's good to know there's only been three so far.

BF: Well, I guess that is a positive.

MH: Absolutely. I think, more broadly, there's a whole range of things, and we've talked about this over and over again on the podcast, but I think it's really interesting to get different insights from our guests. What are some of the really key challenges you see for the industry at the moment? Which ones are the ones that, amongst all the noise, planners should be really paying attention to?

BF: Yeah. Look, I probably want to go back one step from there, and that is that practises now, they not only need to be put in place a business plan, but they need to be putting in place a strategic plan. There are differences between the two. A business plan is more about how you can be the best you can be at whoever or whatever you are right now. So the business you have today, how do you tweak it? How do you go fine tuning it? A strategic plan is much broader, and with the paradigm shifts we've got in advice now, so many moving parts at such a fluid environment, the business models that we've had in the past are falling apart. It's time to step... you know, I've been to the helicopter and take a far more strategic view of their practise about how they're going to fit, what their target market's going to be, how they're gonna make their margin going forward, because their old business model, whether they recognised it or not, is quite possibly already broken.

MH: Absolutely. I think, certainly, within our own business, it's interesting what comes first; the strategic plan or the business plan. Also, we'll often get asked; how far out do we go with our business planning? The reality is I think it makes sense to go out two years, but you've gotta recognise you'll probably be wrong within 12 months. The best business, the most agile, the most nimble businesses are actually able to have both plan in place but be able to update and tweak them on the fly.

BF: Yeah, I think that's a really good summary of it. The strategic plan is much bigger picture, and you will not be 100% right. You cannot accurately, crystal ball, where things are going to land. If we take the Royal Commissions that's going on right now, what are the recommendations going to be the come out of it? What impacts will they have, short-term, medium-term, long-term?

MH: And also, depends on which government we have.

BF: And after the weekend's bi-elections, perhaps the opposition think they've a better chance of getting in that they thought before, so... either which way, we can't be absolutely certain what the recommendations will be, but we can have a sense of direction that is going to impact financial advice practises. That's the important part of strategic planning; getting the sense of direction right, rather than ignoring and saying it's too hard. You need to have an opinion. You need to have... what is our house view on this issue? That issue? And how's it going to impact us?

MH: Remember a little while ago, Business Health put out a report on how many businesses actually do a business plan, let alone a strategic plan. What's your take on it? Is it 25% of the industry or more that are currently sitting down at least once a year to review their business plan? OR is it...

BF: Well, let's pop a balloon. First of all, doing your budget for the coming year is not a business plan, and that's about a far as many businesses go is they sit down and do their numbers. That's better than nothing, but it is not a business plan. For those who are doing a true business plan, I would say, from my experience, that it is less than one in four, and for those that are going back to it on a quarterly basis and saying “how are we going against the business plan? What do we need to shift, change? Where were we right? Where were we wrong?” That's less again.

Then, if we said who is doing a strategic plan, it's hardly any. The biggest challenge I see is that those that sit down and start doing a planning exercise, and all credit to them when they do, is they start about halfway through the process instead of at the beginning of the process.

MH: Or they look for the outcome they want to achieve.

BF: Yeah there's a lot of confirmation bias in how the plan is put together. So I guess what I've found, and the feedback I've been getting from the work I've been doing is the usefulness that I bring is; take them right back to the beginning. What's the context that they're operating in? That's a mixture of your pestle forces, your political, economic, societal, technological, environmental and legislative. What are those forces that are impacting, not only their practise, but the market they operate in financial services, and their ideal clientele. Then, what are their competitive advantages as a practise? Now, most businesses, when you ask them to outline their competitive advantages will start off and put on the white-board maybe six, eight, 10 competitive advantages. Then when you start to challenge those and say “Are they truly an advantage you have in your practise or your business that your competitors don't have?” We might come back to none, or one or two. There's not many that have a truly crafted-out advantage over their competitors.

The third part is about their stakeholders. A lot of businesses ignore thinking about who all the stakeholders are in their practise; they're usually very good at identifying the shareholders or themselves, as principle. Sometimes they overlook their team, but they usually get them in with a bit of prompting. Some completely overlook their spouses or their family and the impact it has on them. There's your licencing, there's your regulator, there's your major product providers or service providers. There's a whole range. Normally, there's around 15-16 that come out pretty commonly. Breaking those down into who is the most important, because they're all important, who's the most important, who's in the mid-range, and who is lower and could be replaced.

MH: But also, for what reasons they're important.

BF: Correct.

MH: Comes to the decision making process.

Brad Fox
Yeah, so then armed with those three things; competitive advantage, an analysis of your environment, and your stakeholders ranked in order of importance, then you can start push and pull levers about what do we want this business to be, pick your timeframe; three years, five years, ten years from now.

MH: If we just stop for a moment, just on the competitive advantage, I think that's a really interesting point and in some ways, it's a little bit like values, where there's no point having things like integrity, honesty on your wall anymore because they're sort of the tickets for games, and/or ticket to the game, and you've gotta have competitive advantages that are different if you are gonna keep winning. What are some of the ones that you would say would be common, and what are some of the best ones you've seen?

BF: The best... well, perhaps the most common and most effective, if I link that to profitability of the business, have usually been around well-carved out niches. For example, some of the practises that have been based in life insurance, that have wonderful niches in the doctors or the surgeons type of market, as one example. Really having a clean, crafted-out niche, where for whatever reason, you are the subject matter experts for that audience.

MH: Yeah, with lots of room to grow, as well.

BF: Absolutely. That's one of the most successful. One of the ones that gets put up there a lot is our people. Our people often get put up as a core competitive advantage, and then you talk about which businesses do you deal with that would say their people are not an advantage? We all like our people, right? We're supposed to be nice to our staff and our team, and they're supposed to love working for us. Everyone says it but very few amongst their team have a true competitive advantage unless there's a particular level of expertise some of them hold, or you really are world class culture and how you deliver that culture in your interactions with your clients. Not many businesses have that.

MH: One of the ones that used to be very popular was their investment expertise or their skills, are you seeing that dropping away more and more as investment markets become more challenging and people focus on revised value proposition which might be wealth or life-coaches?

BF: Yeah, interesting. I actually think there's an upswing at the moment saying that we are some type of investment expert. Perhaps net wealth and it's competitors have helped create some of that pathway. Perhaps not deliberately. We've seen this growth in managed accounts which your Top of the Pops on, yourselves. What it has done, some practises are shaping a message on some self-licensed businesses are shaping a message that they bring a degree of investment expertise that is not available elsewhere. We have to be very careful there, because this has been developing in a generally upward trending share market, and having started advising myself in 2006, just before the GFC, I've seen how discussion about investment returns are terrific in rising markets and become very quickly anchors around your ankles in a falling market.

MH: That's interesting you mention that because I think certainly, a lot of the advice terms that we're working with now and particularly, where they're establishing managed accounts, it's very much been in conjunction with an asset consultant, so they're part of the process but they're not the process, if that makes sense. Very few have actually internalised it and obviously, one of the boards you sit on has made a decision to internalise it which is quite a different proposition where they've made a choice to invest heavily into that area.

BF: Yeah, I think if we think of the big picture of the environment, a couple of the political/economic forces that are in our marketplace at the moment, is what will the future of managed accounts look like? One of the issues that makes me a little nervous is how some of the structures have been put together and how transparent is the charging model between the asset consultancy fee and the financial advice fee. If it is two are related licencing, and let's call that an elaborate self-licensed environment, if it's to that entity which has a different name to the advice practise, does the client understand the same people are getting two lots of the money?

MH: Yeah. Certainly through our structures, it's gotta be very clear. We look at the joint ownership between the different entities and the different licensees, but I think it's a really interesting point you raise, I don't know how we got there so quickly, but we're obviously getting a lot of questions about managed accounts and are they vertically integrated, which is what it comes down to given that they're all commission. Our stance today is that it's actually net wealth that is the product manufactured, and not the advice group, which I think is a really important distinction, and any fee that's being paid to an advice group is a client directed advice fee. So it's clearly consented to upfront. Clearly displayed and very transparent so that the adviser always, and the client, they always know what they're paying and what the advisoe's receiving.

BF: Well if we had sounds effects here, you'd probably get the little high-pitched ding that says "Correct." That's good. When we look at it in terms of competitive advantage, if we come back to that, some practises I fear, may be promoting an investment expertise, at least in the perceptions of what the client hears, that may not be justified because they don't have the rigour behind the investments structure. If we jump back to the PESTEL forces, as the managed account market becomes more mature and the easy pickings are there for net wealth and it's competitors, will we see some of the managed account providers drop the rigour that they require in investment committees and structures that sit behind it to win market share. And if we do that, we sit on next time bomb.

MH: Which would be foolish in the current environment, but certainly that's not our approach.

BF: We've all been around long enough to know that foolish decisions get made.

MH: Get made into trying times.

BF: Yeah.

MH: Now we all love a good acronym. You've mentioned PESTEL a couple of times, how do you have use the PESTEL forces when you're moving into that strategic planning process?

BF: Good question.

MH: And sorry to interrupt, are you planning out three different scenarios for each one, what might happen in each environment? Or are you basically picking one and supporting that as a firm view?

BF: Alright, really good questions. The first thing with PESTEL; it's part of the context for each individual business, so the way business A and business B interpret the forces of same managed accounts could be completely different and both be right. Because it's gotta be in the context of their business, who they are, what they're capabilities are, what they want to be. I don't go in as a consultant with my view around where I think things will play out. I said earlier, it's all crystal-ball; which way will it shape, what will the Royal Commissions recommendations be? I can't tell you I'm right about it, but what I can do is challenge you to say "What are the forces? How might they impact us" and then you could say "is it an opportunity or a threat?" The biggest difficulty most practise owners have or their leadership teams have is drawing far enough back from being buried in their own business and their own existing way of being to see the future for what it might be.

MH: Which is confronting, particularly, at the moment.

BF: Absolutely it's confronting. We know there are business models in play that cannot continue. If we go back a few years now, businesses should have preemptive the outcome of asset report 515 fees for no service. There has been growing examinations and prodding, probing, poking of financial services now for enough years to say that the pressure was mounting on anything that appears to take a consumer for a ride, take advantage of them; it can't continue. So taking feeds, whether that be building commissions or any other type of payment and doing nothing for that client was always gonna be a problem at some point.

MH: I think what's become really apparent through the Royal Commission is what may have legally been okay doesn't necessarily have popular support. When you see those examples, it becomes pretty apparent.

BF: Yeah, that's right. We've now got different tests... there used to be the test of is it legal? Then came the red face test... Would I be embarrassed telling someone about it over a beer at the pub? Then came the front page of the Herald Sun test. Now we've got the [inaudible 00:16:37] Law test. The Royal Commission level, it's another layer, again. It just means we now have to deliver to the perceptions of the public, which is possibly even beyond the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

It's a much larger test but businesses that sat down and did strategic planning three, four, five years ago recognised this type of income in their business, which sometimes, and I can tell you through the judging of the AFA Practises of the Year years ago, that some of the entrance to those awards might've had 80-85% passive clients. They never made it past first base in the awards, but that sort of toxic revenue should've been identified as such three, four, five years ago, and practises should've been either activating the clients or selling it while it was still worth two and a half times, or whatever they could get for it. What's it worth now?

MH: If we look at some of the political, legal challenges, I think we talked out they're all commission now, Fascio. Again, coming back to your comment about it's going to be different for every practise, I think this is a great example because you're gonna have practises that have got more academic qualifications than they need, and you've got those who are gonna have to do a lot of work to get there. Therefore, how people approach that particular item for a strategic planning perspective is going to be very different.

Are you seeing many principles, for example, whom to exit or to take on more of a business and mentoring role than an advice role?

BF: There's all sorts of thoughts going on, and I'm sure most people have read or have seen some of the predictions about the numbers of advisers that will drop out and go "Oh well it won't be that high" and then the UK experience says "Gee, maybe it might be."

MH: Adviser ratings, as we've mentioned in a couple of the earlier podcasts are saying 50% probably too high. What's your number?

BF: Probably too high, but who knows? You gotta remember, we had an ageing adviser force anyway, and a lot were gonna retire somewhere round about now, so there's gonna be that natural attrition, but we'll blame it on education standards any because that's just the way of the world works.

What we will see, undoubtedly, is a drop in adviser number for a period of time. At the same time, we won't see, with enough speed or haste, the catching up of the supply of advisers. We're going to have a shortfall in advisers. What's that gonna do? Well, supply and demand, I suppose the first thing that will happen is the price you've gotta pay a good adviser goes up. Second of all, what does it mean then for the number of clients per adviser in practises if you've got four advisers and one goes because of the standards, can you afford to hire another at the new rate plus pay the others? Or will you try and spread the clients out?

MH: Which then risks not providing the service for the fee that you're collecting.

BF: Correct. So we start to change the value proposition inadvertently to a lower standard. We'll see most likely a number of practise sales that have to result because some of these will be the smaller businesses. If we see a lot more businesses come on the market, practise valuations drop, what's the impact of that? Maybe banking covenants start to be failed for practises that are borrowed heavily to grow scale by buying books.

MH: This is starting to sound like the housing market.

BF: It could be anything, right. It could spiral. So what do you do as a practise? You've gotta form your view about what the likely outcomes are, but I think you can get the sense of direction.

MH: And not lag two years to make a call on it?

BF: Definitely don't wait two years. You need to be acting now before everyone else. Which is either preparing to buy when things are cheap, perhaps.

MH: Or sell at the top.

BF: Or sell as early as you can to get the best price that you can. They need to be strategically thinking about what is the current level of qualifications of our advisers. Some practises still don't actually have a little list put together. Put a list together.

What's the sense of direction of where this is going? If it means advisers are gonna be hard to come by, can we risk losing the ones we've got? So either put it an up scaling plan for the ones that we have, lock them in. Are they good enough to have... perhaps the opportunity to be part-owner in your practise so that they stay and remain? Do you need to become a employer of choice when you haven't been one before? What do you need to change about your culture, your operating environment so people want to stay and lock in?

So these are the bigger picture leaders to pull. A couple of the business I'm involved with, Stanford Brown and Tribeca Collective both take their culture incredibly seriously. They address it differently, but they've bee non the front foot about saying we want to be an employer of choice. I think that's part of the strategic thinking is getting the centre direct, but you've gotta then say "What will we do about it?"

Rather than being twig or a leaf floating down the river wherever the water takes you, you wanna be able to paddle. You gotta work out where you're trying to get to and start putting the actions in place to be there. It means making brave decisions.

MH: That's a fairly big topic. Incredible insights there, and if advisers aren't thinking about that now, they really do need to be. What are some of the other sleeping giants that you see that people should be paying attention to and possibly aren't yet?

BF: I think one is what will happen with the licensee space.

MH: Do you have a view on that?

BF: I do, but again its more important others develop their view because I might not be right. We've seen some big picture things already. We've seen Dover close its doors and 400-odd advisers have to rush out and find a new home if they can. We've seen the banks saying we're going to change the way our licensee's fit with us, perhaps we're going to spin them off, perhaps we're going to sell them. We saw ANZ already sell to IOOF so there you got two instos in completely different mindsets.

One, get rid of them. The other, accumulate them. What's the impacts going to be? Well I think you start, as a practise, have to make decisions about what is our philosophy about the sort of licencing arrangement that will be of the best benefit for our medium- to long-term future and move towards it. That might not be rush out and become self-licensed because there is no rush out and do that now that ASICS have nine months to evaluate an application. Perhaps it's deciding between insto-aligned, non-insto and ultimately, is it self-licensed or boutique-licensed.

MH: The feedback is not every adviser wants to be self-licensed. They're busy running their business, they're busy seeing clients. The thought of doing a lot of the work that their dealer groups currently does for them really doesn't rock their world.

BF: Absolutely true. If we throw into the mix another level, we've seen ASICS recent report on 575 into self-managed super funds and we can see the limited licencing regime isn't working either and they're starting to pay attention to the predominantly accounting space that had gone into limiting licences and saying 90% of your advice is no good so we're gonna have to fix that. At what period in time will ACIS turn its attention to the boutique- and self-licensed space and say we better have a look there now because the momentum has gone towards it so we better just check it out.

Everyone rushed off to the safe-haven of self-licensed, small-licensed, boutique-licensed just to get there in time for the sharks to arrive. You know what I mean? It's really saying whatever you're going to be, be high-conviction about it. Nothing erodes client trust more than consistently chopping and changing the appearance of what you are and who you are. Be very deliberate.

If you want to change from the licencing space that you're in today to another, it cannot be a rushed decision, and I really do feel for those Dover advisers that have had to do it as a rushed decision. I suspect if we looked back at where they went, if we look back in 24 months time, we would see a high proportion of those that went somewhere and then went somewhere else because they rushed to get a home.

MH: For those that are looking potentially to change licence, is there anything in your mind that you would suggest that they look at or is there a priority; is it culture, is it resources, is it advice tools? What are those sort of things? And again, I appreciate that it's going to change practise by practise. What are the big items that they should be thinking about?

BF: What I'll say now is going to apply to those looking to change home and perhaps those that have already gone self-licensed or a leading a licensee. The focus on the licensees ability to sufficiently train and make competent advisers is an absolute red hot zone right now. A lot of the businesses that have gone self-licensed think that because their intent is right about delivering the right advice the right way, client's best interests are at the heart of every decision that we make, that is not enough. They actually have to be able to prove that they're living it through all the advice documents.

Most advisers would probably agree with the statement that whether it's assets reporting to life insurance or the self-managed super fund or all the others around the quality of advice, ASIC don't... they've got better at this... haven't always broken down the difference between advice failures at client detriment or possibly client detriment, versus those that are compliance failure. Either which one can cost you your livelihood. You can give good advice but non-compliantly, and still cost you your licence or your right to practise.

MH: In this environment, many advisers are actually looking at future-proofing their business by setting up your licence or their own licence and you're exactly right. If it's not done properly, you'll actually end up potentially much worse than you may have been.

BF: The thing that goes hand in hand with that is my experience has been that most advisers over-estimate their understanding of what is required of them under the law. I might go the other way and say that perhaps some of the licensees legal advisers over-estimate what is required to meet the law too.

There's two ends of the equation here; there's the over compliance and under compliance. I guess these days you have to err on the side of over compliance. For those who are going to the self-licensed or boutique-space, all looking to change licensee, you want to look for what is the rigour that goes into the compliance regime.

MH: You would have to suggest that it's at least, at a minimum, one full time person to look after it.

BF: I think that's the reality, even in a small boutique practise, somebody has to have their neck on the line for doing the job right.

MH: It's not a part-time role.

BF: It is a part-time role if you can partner with the right organisation that is high-touch with your organisation to check how you're going. Not just check, but also be able to tell you what you need to do to be able to up skill. There's very few providers I've seen out there that can honestly do that very well, but that's the first thing.

Gone are the days, I won't put names on this one... but gone are the days where you should even remotely think I'm going to choose a licensee based on a pretty low and affordable fee and they only want to order a couple of files a year, and they let me choose which two. That's just rubbish. Advisers, practise owners must change their mindset about what compliance audits are about. They should be like a footballer wanting to hear from his coach how do I play better? What else can I do? If it's a PT example, you train in the gym, you want to know from the PT "how do I train better? How do I get fitter? How do I get stronger?"

We've gotta change this whole mindset about what compliance is. Compliance should be the greatest help, the most look-forward appointment of your quarter. What can I learn, what can I get better at? We've gotta remove this thing that, "Oh god, here it comes." You know? "I'm gonna have to defend myself again, I'm gonna be on the back foot here." We've gotta just change the mindset and it's up to each individual to do that. Because it can't be that you go kicking and screaming into this compliance regime we have now. Same with the Code of Ethics when it comes out and hits and you have to belong to one. We've got to embrace it and say "This is just part of the next paradigm for financial advice, quite possibly we will be the most over-qualified, over CPD'd profession in Australia, so be it. If we become all those things maybe one day we'll become the most well-hide, and trusted."

MH: Moving into the next period of uncertainty I think you're right. Having a great service provider there. We look back at what happened in 2012-2013 leading into FOFA, it was a rush towards the institutions who seemed to be the only ones who were resourced up appropriately to navigate through those changes, subsequently we've seen everyone leaving those institutions but we're heading into an environment that very much looks like or could be worth something that FOFA reforms.

BF: We know things are going to shift and change and it's gonna be some really challenging things along the way. Anything requiring legislative change usually seems to take considerably longer, at least to get to the full implementation phase that everyone expects.

I still remember being coerced, prodded, and poked into running for AFA President all those years ago.

MH: Look where that got you.

BF: Yeah it's been a terrific journey. But I went into that very naively thinking that "Well there's six months of negotiation of FOFA left to go, and then I'll have 18 months of my two years term of president to help my peers embed the changes into their practise." Well, it was about five more years to get to the end of FOFA and I, if we have the Royal Commission and other changes that I think we should still expect, we're not at the end of it. This is a ten, 12 year, 15 year journey into the new paradigm of financial advice, which is going to be a great place to be, but it will be nothing like the place that we were. I guess that's the challenge. That's a challenge for anyone that is emotionally attached, have their identity deeply embedded into the practise that they've built, because they've been really good at what they've done up until now. Where do they get the help, how do they get the confidence to accept that won't measure up in the future? To be honest about what might need to change and then be proactive and brave enough to start taking the steps to change.

Don't leave it to accident.

MH: And that comes right back to the beginning where we started off with that strategic plan being probably the most important thing you can do in your business this year.

BF: Yeah, and whether you go and undertake it with all the people in your practise playing a role, whether you do it with a practise development manager through your licensee, whether you do it with peps and peers put together, whether you do it with a consultant. Whichever way, don't go into it with a mindset "I can't afford to get this wrong." Strategic planning is always wrong, but at least it gives you a sense of direction and gets you in the habit of starting to change about earning the competence within yourself that you can change. Courage is the ability to take action despite recognising the fear that you have, but it's only when we take action that we can actually start to develop some competence. When you try something new, you're not that competent, when you do it repeatedly, more time, you become more competent. Once you become competent, you become confident. That's what we're going to need to do to bring these businesses into these new era, this new world, is develop the courage to try things enough times to become competent, to then have the confidence to keep changing, keep the momentum building, and out of that, we end of with a practise that we're really proud of again.

MH: Brad there's a lot to take in and a lot to digest from the last 30 minutes, and I think we could probably have spoken for another 30 minutes. Are there any resources that you would suggest advisers to look at to help them along this journey or to get started? You've mentioned things like peer groups and leveraging practise manage. Is there any online resources or books that you rate very highly to help people get started?

BF: Not specifically into financial advice.

MH: Just strategic planning in general?

BF: Matt, I haven't found one particular resource that I think's really well, which is why I put together my own strategic planing model. Too many of them start too late in the process. They don't really get you to examine who you are and what's happening in your environment. If people want to email me or contact me through LinkedIn, and ask for a few pointers, I'm more than happy to provide that out to them to get them started.

The most important part though, perhaps even more important than having a decent model to work through, is get enough people around them that will challenge them and not tell them the answers. Because other people's answers don't matter. It's about leading them to develop their own answers and own views.

MH: We've gotta be really mindful that we don't end up with group think.

BF: Absolutely.

MH: Yes, it's great to have peers around us, but if we're all using the same model or adopting the same model for too long, we're not actually going to get the outcomes that we need which are potentially radically different to what they are today.

BF: Some of the great workshops examples have been where there's a mixture of different experiences at the table. They don't all have to come from financial services either. It's often quicker if they do because they understand the jargon and all the things. To at least be able to test thinking or test particular ideas on colleagues that you've got that own their own businesses in other environments is a good starting place.

Get an academic to talk to you. If they're paid by an institution, they're normally happy to have a conversation with someone out in the real world. So speak to an academic.see what they think about what's going on in your world. But reach out to good people that you know are in the organisation, and use the two-beers rule. Buy them a beer and until the beer's finished, you've got time to talk.

MH: Brad, it's been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today. Some fantastic insights. I hope people do take you up on your offer and connect with you via LinkedIn. Hopefully not too many. You've done a lot for the industry, really love the work you're doing now as far as helping the industry progress and wish all the best with your various endeavours.

BF: Thanks, Matt. I appreciate the opportunity to have a chat about what I'm going at SmartBrave and it's been a really rewarding journey to step out of the AFA and get back involved with practises at a much more coal-face level.