#401 Julian Manning and Joel Gleeson – Transcript

James Wrigley
Hello, welcome back to the podcast. I’m James Wrigley. And today we’re going to talk about career paths into financial advice professional year. And you know, the different ways that people can find themselves ending up in financial advice. I’ve spoken previously on different podcasts about my own journey. And the older that I get as much as I hate to admit that I’m getting old these days. I get a lot of younger people asking me about what did I do and what was it like and so forth. So I’ve asked Joel Gleeson and Julian Manning, who who both work with me here at first financial both have very different career paths to get to where they’re at, to maybe talk through what they’ve been doing and what they’ve been up to. So guys, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, thanks very much. Let’s go good. Good to get to have a chat with you with you both, or at least recorded anyway. So fairly regularly. So maybe, both of you when we start drawl, we’ll start with you. What are you up to today? Like, what is your job in financial advice today? Where are you at?

Joel Gleeson
Yeah, so I work in as part of James’s broader pod under an advisor. His name is Paul Kubik, and I’m his associates. I work directly with him and we service his clients as a team, I think it’s roughly around 130 of them. So and then as extension to that, during my professional year, as well, which we’re going to discuss today, sort of with the ambition to move into an advice role in the near future.

James Wrigley
And how long have you been doing the role of an associate for?

Joel Gleeson
I started at first financial and an associate role under another advisor in September 2019. But have been in the industry since sort of the start of 2019. Working out other arms of financial services in the past, but decided to land on financial advice. And yeah, I’ve been, it’s been a few years now. And I’m really enjoying it.

James Wrigley
Julian, how about you? What are you up to today?

Julian Manning
Yeah, so similar to Joel, I’m an associate advisor, obviously, directly under you, James, do much the same as what Joel does with Paul. And I’m also going through my professional year, almost at the end of quarter two. Yeah, just waiting for the exam results for that.

James Wrigley
Yep. Nice. Nice. And so I wanted to, I get asked questions often about, you know, what did I study? And what have I done and different jobs that I’ve had, and so forth? So, as I said, you two have very, you’re doing somewhat similar jobs now, but gotten to that point in a very different manner. So maybe, Joel, if we start with you, Can we can we kind of go back to you finished high school? What happened after that? What did you do after that? Yeah,

Joel Gleeson
so go through high school and and throughout high school, I did basically every sort of business see type of subject that that school offered at the time, so I had that way inclined. So after I finished school, I studied at RMIT, and did a bachelor of economics and finance. It was an applied course. So with that, it meant that I had to do a year working in the industry. And I during that period, I worked at a shipping company of all things in the marketing department, which is a little bit different. But that was example what I did there. I did it a little bit took a little bit longer than I suppose normally take in that I also did an exchange overseas. So it just extended the degree out a little bit but but when I did eventually come back, I got a job in mortgage broking in a client services type role. Didn’t feel like that was such a great fit for me. So I had a few sort of mentors in my life that that were in the financial advice space, and I thought it’d be a really good area for me. So that’s when I shifted into a swap was a smaller financial advising practice for a couple of months. I work there and then ultimately, on to first financial

James Wrigley
said you you only did a couple of months elsewhere before before the associate role at first financial

Joel Gleeson
Yeah, it was yeah, about six to seven month period there

James Wrigley
and a client services role

Joel Gleeson
Client Services style role. Yep. And didn’t it wasn’t quite a fit for me. It was quite far away from home this think Little things like that. And then well, I thought was a really good opportunity at first financial opened up. So I took that. But yeah, I suppose and then in terms of studying, so obviously did The Bachelor. But with the sort of the new changes since the Royal Commission, there’s now an obligation to do like a specified course to become a financial adviser and my course my Bachelor’s didn’t fall into that. So that’s why I’ve also done the Graduate Diploma of financial planning with cat plan. So because I want eight subjects. So that’s I finished that now. And if I want to I’m four subjects away from a master, but I’ll put that into big Asterix if I want to. Can everyone that does

James Wrigley
that tie did a similar course as well. But everyone, they get to the end of it and they go, Oh, I finally did for more than I’ll have a master’s. People actually go back and

Joel Gleeson
do the first financial make us do another SMSF related subject. So I’m doing that at the moment. So another way to look at it is three months ago, but yeah, we’ll have to put a bit of thought into that.

James Wrigley
So it does the SMSF. One, would that count towards the masters?

Joel Gleeson
Yeah. So currently, right now, as we speak, I’m actually enrolled in the Masters at Kaplan, whether I decide to continue to, to do the next three that I need to finish the masters.

James Wrigley
A bit closer. Okay. And so how was how did you find doing the studying at CapitaLand? Whilst you were working at the same time?

Joel Gleeson
Yeah, it’s, it’s challenging, there’s no doubt about it, it felt like an interesting time in everyone’s life, I suppose. Well, parts of it, were during the COVID period. So in a way, you are home a lot of the time. So you can feel like you’re missing out and do many other things that surround your life, such as social things, because everyone was like I as well. But there was no data was challenging. And, right now I’m doing another subject. So, you know, I find after work that I’ve got to set aside a couple of more hours to study. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it is hard. But one thing I do find it, it’s actually very satisfying. When you when you finish it, you look back and you go, I’ve done this while working. And I’ve been able to get through this, like there is a really good bit of satisfaction. When you see the results and you pass it you get through

James Wrigley
much, much application, either of what you’re doing at work to the studies, does that make understanding your studies easier, or vice versa, what you’re learning in this study

Joel Gleeson
is definitely very appliable. So learning things such as contributions, how they work, starting stopping, pinch, all the things that we do on a daily basis, it was very appliable. To, to the to the studying. So it was useful. I did learn a lot. But at the same time being at first financial and working day to day and experiencing those things is just as valuable as well. So

James Wrigley
you just got the piece of paper kind of to back up the work experience that Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Julian habit, how about you, I know you’ve got a bit of a different career path to get to, to where you’re at. Talk us through say, you’ve just had your 30th birthday. So happy birthday. Thank you. For that. A you came to financial advice a little bit later in life? Can you maybe talk us through? Go back to you, okay, you’re finished high school? What did you do after that? And then how have you ended up where you are?

Julian Manning
Yeah. So out of high school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for work. I always knew I was saying that helping people is what I wanted to do. So when I was in my final year of high school, I had just a part time job at the local liquor store. So if I look up from there, sort of moved on to a full time role at Dan Murphy’s, still had no idea of what I was going to do. So I sort of just bouncing around jobs and going to warehousing in sort of construction nuts and bolts. And then from there, I worked for the same boss for the next five, six years, and eventually went into a sales rep job in electrical components. It was one day I was sitting on the couch with my wife and brother in law talking about the stock market. And I at that time, I I knew nothing about it, nothing about financial planning, tax, anything like that. Oh, talking about the stock market and I started to do some research into it. And what jobs lead from the stock market I started getting to invest in and found that financial planning is actually a really good way of helping people. So while still doing sort of sales wrapping, I started doing uni. So before I even got into the industry started my bachelor’s degree through University of South Australia. And then not long after I started that I got an entry level role into the client services role at a firm on Collin Street. I was in that role for about six months for moving into a power plane role in the same firm and then had a few changes and about to another role in power planning. And then ended up about just over a year ago. We’ve you Jane has been your associate.

James Wrigley
Yep. And so what what was the the degree you’re doing through a uni essay? What

Julian Manning
was a Bachelor of Business majoring in financial planning, which meant met all the new standards? Okay, So there’s no further study required from that, like drawl get to go and do the grad dip. Mine was all pure purely for financial planning middlemen your requirements.

James Wrigley
Yeah. And and so how I guess I want it in South Australia and you live in Victoria. So I imagine that’s via via distance, like, how was that course delivered to you? What did you do so

Julian Manning
it was 100% online. So we had a had a portal online, where we would have all our courseware uploaded, we’d have all of our lectures on there, we’d have weekly zooms for different subjects. And all of our exams are also done online as well. So I could do it 100% remote. So they

James Wrigley
those lectures where they pre recorded lectures, or you sat through a lecture, post doing something on Zoom.

Julian Manning
So they’re all pre recorded. Yep. And I want to upload it. So you could do it as quickly or as slowly as you like, each subject went for 10 weeks at a time. Also, there was in that 10 weeks, they’ll set due dates for some assignments. And then once a week, you’d have a live question and answer with the teachers.

James Wrigley
So it wasn’t so much like the university experience maybe the Joel had, and I would have had where your year was typically broken up into semesters, you know, semester one, you did four subjects, semester two, you did four subjects. And after three years, you’ve done your you’ve done your whatever you needed to do.

Julian Manning
The unit of essay, basically the easiest way to explain that it’s like a school year. Yep. So is there’s four terms, basically that go for 10 weeks each, and you do two subjects in each term. So you’re only doing two subjects at a time, they both go for 10 weeks. And without a talk through that time you have your assignments. And then in the final week, you have your exam, they always open the coursework a week or two early. They if you’re on the ball, you tend to jump in and try and try and get the first five or six weeks done in the first couple of weeks that way coming towards the end of the exam, you could slow down a little bit and regroup.

James Wrigley
And so that you say you said that you do two subjects at a time, was there any capacity to do more or less? Like, could you do one? Or could you do three?

Julian Manning
Yeah, so I could do one, if I wanted to. Sometimes I could have done three, if I would do one, it would mean the three year degree would basically go to a six year degree. And that’s not something I wanted to do. And during a third subject, it would have been very, very challenging because I was working working full time at the same time as well.

James Wrigley
So how did you manage and manage that doing the two university subjects and working at the same time?

Julian Manning
It wasn’t easy, there was a lot of sacrifice. But it was the COVID times as well, which made things a little easier, because like Joel said, you’re at home. So you had a five kilometer radius, you couldn’t really go very far. So that helps, but there was a lot of sacrifices. You missed out on a lot of things with friends. But you sort of had to do that was the short term pain for the long term game.

James Wrigley
Yeah. And so how long ago did you completely finish the union? So

Julian Manning
I finished December 2020. So I just recently got the official results. And I’m actually got my little certificate in the mail a couple of weeks ago. So that was nice to have that because I didn’t go up there graduation, because in Adelaide? Yeah.

James Wrigley
So if anyone contemplating a career change, would we kind of got any, would you? Would you do anything differently next time around? Like, if you’re doing it again,

Julian Manning
more look into the different pathways into financial advice. So I just saw that there was a bachelor’s degree and do that, knowing that there was graduate diplomas, Diploma of financial planning, and there’s other pathways into it. Find out what suits you because during the Bachelor of Business, there’s a lot of subjects that are business related, not so much financial planning related. That weren’t as is interesting to me as a financial planning subjects where I believe so the Graduate Diploma and things like that a purely on financial planning for the Bachelor of Business that has a wide range of different subjects, and not all of them will be applicable

James Wrigley
to do either of you. There’s a question to either I don’t know the answer. And so I’m asking you, like he said, so jolly did like them, the Graduate Diploma? If you didn’t have a degree to begin with? Could you have just done the Graduate Diploma and gotten to where you need to get to? Or is it you have to do the masters like the way your

Julian Manning
diploma of financial planning, so the DFP and the Graduate Diploma after that? Okay, right. DFPS eight subjects, I believe, and then I think the Graduate Diploma is another

James Wrigley
eight subjects,

Julian Manning
eight, who was

Joel Gleeson
all i all i haven’t researched the question, but I do remember when I went through the process of getting into the Graduate Diploma, I needed to give my Bachelor’s transcript academic transcript, so there was something they asked for.

James Wrigley
I think I’ll recall having to do the same thing not when I went through it, it’s just pure a fluke that I did the did my university degree, did a commerce degree. And then somebody similar to you guys didn’t really know what I wanted to do, I started doing this Graduate Diploma before I was even in financial advice, and ended up doing the four specialist subjects at the end that made it financial advice related. We, I think I could only do that because I had a degree to begin with, was I remember someone else back then when I was doing that someone else that was working with me, back then, we’re not here to do the masters. This is under the old rules, it’s not the current rules, he had to do the Masters because he didn’t have a university degree to get some particular qualification, whatever it was. Okay, so that’s so I guess, so that, so that, you know, I guess, different pathways to kind of ticking you off to say, hey, you’ve done the education requirements to be to be a financial advisor? What, what comes next after that?

Joel Gleeson
Yeah, so I suppose from, from my point of view, really, the next part to build up into I suppose, as a main reason we’re gonna be changed today is starting that that professional year. So And with that, I think it comes with a little little bit more, right. So you’ve got, you’ve been working in as an associate, you’ve done your education. So you should have, you know, a solid grounding in the strategic elements and sort of some of the investment piece side of what we do insurance as well. But then once you really start your professional year and getting into, okay, I want to be an advisor, it goes, alright, well, now we need to shift to ultimately you going to be sitting in a room in front of our client, and going through a review or statement of advice presentation. Now you need to build those skills, you know, those soft skills of presenting and making sure you explain something that can be complex in an easy way for clients to understand. So that’s, as James, I know, we talked quite a lot. And as Paul as well, it’s been a big focus of mine. So that’s where that’s where your career development shifts to, I feel that’s the that’s the the next challenge, if so to speak you.

James Wrigley
So why don’t we So there’s four quarters to the professional year. Maybe Joel, why don’t you actually start there like so Julian, why don’t you? Can you talk about what’s required of you for the first two quarters, given that you’re, you’re kind of just about at the end of quarter two, you’re waiting for your exam? So, so what’s required of you in the first two quarters? And then Joel, I’ll get you to comment on what’s required of you in the last two quarters, because that’s kind of where you’re sitting right now.

Julian Manning
Yeah, certainly. So the first quarter is basically just an observation quarter they call it. So it’s basically just shadowing an advisor sitting in meetings, and watching how they present things deal with clients scenarios. So quarter one is pretty straightforward, you got to do some, some set amount of hours in sort of back office hours, some ROA, preparation, things like that, and more shadowing. So the first one’s pretty straightforward. quarter two, is a little bit more challenging. So not so much shadowing, you’ve actually got to start presenting to clients. So I believe the py was a six client meetings that you have to be starting to present. But on top of that, there’s hours you’ve got to complete. And also, you’ve got to write some statement of advices and some strategic airways and have them ticked off. But before you can move on to quarter three, you’ve got to pass the advisor exam. That’s one of the biggest hurdles that I have them every three months.

James Wrigley
So you’re just you’re just set, you’ve just set that exam. What was how was the exam?

Julian Manning
I did a lot of preparation for it. So hopefully, I have a positive result, it was certainly challenging that most of its multiple choice with five or six short answer questions. The multiple choice were very open ended, I found that two of the answers were very, very similar. So you really need to relate it back to the question. And it’s been a lot of time reading the questions to get the insight to what the right answer would actually be.

James Wrigley
on yourself. In the exam, they give you a whole lot of materials that you can, yeah, it’s not an open book exam. It’s a closed book exam. But hey, they give you a few materials that you can reference to, did you find yourself digging through that material much in that in trying to answer some of the questions?

Julian Manning
Yeah, certainly did, especially around sort of the AML acts and the privacy acts that were probably the main ones that stumped me a little bit. But having it all there on hand and being on a computer, you can just Ctrl F and search make things a lot easier. So a lot of the layout and preparation was searching through those documents and how to what code words to basically use to find certain parts of the act of preparation. Yeah.

James Wrigley
And so what did you do in terms of studying for the exam?

Julian Manning
So I did the tail masterclass, which was very insightful. So there’s goes for about five hours just on demand. Watch all the different videos, they give you some readings of different asteroids like the corpse act AML, Privacy Act, and Apollo other ones. And then they have a little bit of a 30 question practice exam at the end of that. But then also, when you register for the exam, there’s 115, question practice exam that you can do online. And that gives you all the answers once you complete it, and it gives you feedback also, as well. So it does tell you why that answer is the correct one, and why some of the answers are incorrect. A lot of reading, and multiple practice exams.

James Wrigley
Good luck. So hopefully, you’ll get your results in

Julian Manning
three weeks all the way. So

James Wrigley
it’s a job of your your being through this process already, you know, you’ve obviously ticked off quarter one, quarter two with writing your SOPs and airways and sitting the exam. How did how did you find the exam? And I guess where are you at in your provisional year?

Joel Gleeson
Yeah, so touching the exam first year. reiterate a lot of the things that Julie mentioned there, it’s, it’s not, it’s a little bit challenging, like you got, you do have to study for us on something that you could just roll in and complete a thought to listen to your experience in the industry. And you think you can just go into it, I don’t think that will get you very far, you still need to actually study the material. So I did that last year. And thankfully, I did pass. So with that, that allowed me to move into the second half of the py year. So I’m currently in the last quarter. So last quarter as of the beginning of May. And I suppose where things shift a little bit. It’s just reiterating some of the things Julie mentioned in the quarter to about being actually in meetings and presenting a part of it. I think a good way to look at it look at it is we have to document the hours that we do and NHI was documented and of what we what we did in that period, q1 and two, there’s like client observation means you’re sitting there and observe on Q three and four, it’s more like, Okay, you having a fact you’re going through a fact fine with a client, you need to do the risk profile questionnaire, you do the question and not be advised sitting there, you’re in the spotlight and you do it and ticking off that you’re doing those sorts of things that that makes up a large portion of Q three, Q three and four. There’s more financial plans and need to write. So I’ve got to write at least two statements of advice, and a couple more strategic records of advice. And at first financial, as I mentioned earlier, we need to do this the self managed Superfund course. So I’m doing that at the moment as we advise in that space. And then a little bit later, towards the end of my last quarter, there’s a couple of little requirements that I need to do, namely, observe a couple of ethical dilemmas as I’m working, and how I’ve managed that conflict, you know, between what’s best for the client and what could be a conflict in that space. So I would observe two of those and write a little piece on it and how I manage that conflict. So yeah, that there’s some of the other little things that I’ve got to do in this last quarter, and then hopefully around sort of the August, September period, or should be finished and be authorized.

James Wrigley
And so, so that the signing off on the professional year. That’s that’s the business signs off on on that. So you know, trying to help some others that were businesses that might be looking at taking on an associate advisor with a view to helping them through professional. Yeah, I know, for some people that might be some businesses, that might be a little bit daunting, but But how does the how does the business support you through this? And who’s taking off different different things along the way? Yeah.

Joel Gleeson
So we are the first instance we have the advisor that we work with. So from my understanding, the advisor that we work with has to have at least two to three years experience. I don’t know the exact number so that they’re your first port of call their first bit of support that you have there. At the end of every quarter as well. We sit down with our compliance officer whose name is Shawn, and go through what we’ve done throughout that period. Discuss challenges we’ve had, discuss areas that we might need some assistance with. So I think a really good example for that is when we have to write out statements of advice. We’re able to lean on our power planning team to help us to using the well solver parts of x plan those those things we don’t use on a daily basis on our job. So they’re the other teams around us that that really assist us to get to tick off the things you need to do to be able to finish off that professional year.

James Wrigley
Yep. And maybe Julian, if you comment on, do you quite aside from you have to do the professional year if you want to become a financial advisor? Do you feel it’s also a worthwhile exercise in your own kind of career development or, or not? Do you think maybe it holds you back in? In some places?

Julian Manning
No, I certainly think it helps you. It’s a big step from being an associate advisor to an advisor to be able to have a regimented training plan to make sure that you’re ready to go out into basically a new world, it certainly helps you spend time developing your soft skills, which you really need to do so that when you actually take the steps to come advisor, you know, you’re ready to do it, not just coming straight out of your uni course into an advisor role, where clients might think you’re green and things like that. Having a regimented training plan, definitely going to help future advisors to make sure that they’re ready and deliver the best client experience possible.

James Wrigley
Do either of you have you know, maybe last last last few minutes, we’ll have a chat. But Do either of you have any? Any tips for anyone else that might be offended? Maybe they’re just about they’re in their last year of uni, and they’re aspiring to get into financial advice, or they’re doing the whole career change thing like you did? Julian? Do either of you have any? Any tips for anyone that that might be looking at doing it? If you if you could go back and say, Oh, maybe I would have done this thing a little bit differently, I would have done that thing a little bit differently. Any tips? Or even a question that I get asked a lot? From the two of you? Where do you even start in terms of a job in financial advice? Any tips like that?

Julian Manning
Yes. So when I started, our second, I did about 20, job applications to financial planning firms. were to sell off my resume for entry level roles and got nowhere. The one that got me was I had to make a make a phone call. So I didn’t submit a resume. So I did talk about myself and talk, talk myself out basically. And that’s how I got the first role. But it’s just keep applying and apply as soon as possible. So as soon as you know, you want to go into that industry, or you’re considering starting uni, take the hit early on, especially if you’re sort of on a larger wage. And you know, take it a step back, do it as early as possible, and try and get that entry level role as soon as possible. Because it will help you in the long term. So I had three years experience by the time I finished my bachelor’s degree, in financial planning of of different roles, and I felt that was a big helps you see people come into our firm that go into SAS roles, they’re just finishing uni, where I sort of took the different approach and started while I was in uni. So that’s why when I finished the degree, I’ve got that experience behind me and the knowledge

Joel Gleeson
I’ve got the same thing, I think it’s important to start as a client services role gives you a good grounding of this the back end side of the business. And then my tip would be just to be to be as inquisitive as you can, you know, a lot of the time advisors are happy enough to have you into a review meeting. So tap them on the shoulder and ask if they if you can do that. If you’re working through a, you know implementation of this advice, take a step back and ask why are we doing it. And again, people in the industry are more than happy to explain the reasoning to young people to give them a chance. So something I would, I would definitely do. And then, in terms of the professional year, I think if you think a career in financial planning is something that you want, and you want to be an advisor, I would start it as early as possible. The reason for that, and I was interested in Julian’s response, but I do feel like the professional you can, can go on for a long period of time, and a lot of the beginning of it is it’s documenting things that you’ve been doing for a long time anyway. So start as early as you can, because as I said, the first part is that observation piece. So it’s just literally writing down. These are the things I did today. The beginning of it. So if you can start earlier. I think that puts you in a better position to not feel like you’re sort of doing the same things for a long period of time.

James Wrigley
So maybe is that do you think stuff started earlier? And then you’ll you’ll finish it earlier or just started earlier? And instead of taking one year you take two years or you take three years to do your professional year. But as you’re kind of just growing in your role, you’re also ticking off the things that you need.

Joel Gleeson
That’s exactly as you’re growing in your role. You’re ticking off what you need. Due to finish your professional here as well, because it’s I think it’s a bit of a misconception that it’s a professional year, it’s a professional 18 months, and maybe even longer. Because there are, you know, we’ve touched on the exam, if you if you’re unfortunate to not pass the exam, you can’t go to the next stage until you’re past, they run the exams I join, you might not be better than me quarterly basis, the

Julian Manning
only basis and once you sit the exam, you’ve got to wait six weeks for years. Yeah.

Joel Gleeson
So a time delay between Yeah, so this, I think this sort of really builds on my point I was making earlier, it’s not it’s not 12 months, it’s more more like 18 plus. So if you can start it as early as possible. If you think advisors are all you want to do. Talk to your management about starting as early as possible.

James Wrigley
Okay, guys, well, thanks for joining me today. As I said at the outset, I get asked fairly regularly about a career paths and so forth and financial advice. I thought I’d ask the two of you on giving you two or leaving that right now. And it’s a bit more relevant, versus what I did many, many years ago. So thank you for joining me. Really appreciate it. And I’ll see you on the office soon because

Joel Gleeson
thanks for sharing.

James Wrigley
Thanks, guys.