#403 Bruce Madden – Transcript

James Wrigley
Hello, welcome back to another episode. I’m James Wrigley. And I have the pleasure of speaking with Bruce Madden. Bruce runs a business called Madden and Associates, a PR communications that kind of thing. I’ll get Bruce to explain what he’s up to. But I was just saying before we pressed record, we should have pressed record as soon as we started this. Video good tonight we’ve had already anyway, Bruce, thank you for joining me this afternoon to

Bruce Madden
Heike. Thank you, James. And yeah, I agree, it’s lovely to talk to you. And I think the concept of quality financial advice and the growth of the ensemble idea and this this collective notion of advisors coming together to help themselves. I really love that. So it’s a pleasure to be here. And I hope I can add some value to the listeners.

James Wrigley
Thanks. Thanks for Thanks for joining us. So we’re going to tackle this kind of idea of advice, reputation or advisor reputation, and we’ll come at it from a few different angles. But that’ll be that’ll kind of be the gist of the podcast. And maybe if we start off with a I think it might be a tricky question to answer. You might not think the case but but this idea of advice, reputation, is there a difference between advice reputation from from an industry professional perspective, versus an advisor reputation? So my reputation versus another advisor versus someone other two different hat and hat? How are they different?

Bruce Madden
Yeah, it’s a wonderful question. Thank you. And it’s an important question, because the two are intertwined. And what we know about reputation is that your personal effort, your personal relationships, your business, your results that you achieve with your customers will have a huge determinant on your personal reputation. Okay, now, you’re operating under that brand, but also, essentially an umbrella brand of financial advice. So you know, that it’s, it’s the old adage, really, and I do a lot of work in helping organizations in the financial services base with their reputation as it relates to managing media and their public face. So how they’re represented through media, and I look back over the last 30 odd years of doing this as a journalist, and also in the last 20 years as an advisor and PR person, or strategic communications person, really. And I say, Well, you know, there are so many great advisors who have a fantastic reputation or do excellent work, who have been tarred with the brush of the reputation of what was financial advice, but misconstrued financial advice. Yeah. So that that’s really interesting to me, James, because I remember standing up one time at a Financial Planning Association, Congress, it was in the mid 2000s. And I was talking exactly on this subject, but in that time, so that’s 2007. In fact, just before the global financial crisis before the world got a bit crazy, so I got up and there was maybe 2000 people in the room, and I talked about the movie 300 Starring Gerard Butler, and I like it that movie, which was a story of some 300 Brave Spartans who fought off the might of the Persian armies and those 300 were, in my narrative, the financial advisors, suffering the slings and arrows of the regulators, the consumer lobby, the media, and other protagonists who are sick trying to attack them on the basis of their perceived weaknesses as a financial advice, a true and genuine financial advice offer. And I helped to promote the idea that the best way to protect your reputation, defend your reputation, build and create a positive reputation was yes, you’ve got to observe all the regulatory issues, you’ve got to understand the consumer. And at that point, it was mostly the industry superannuation funds that were quite vocal in attacking advice. But you have to reach deep and identify those things that where you actually personally make a difference, in any sense. corporatize that so corporatize, that essence of quality advice, and that was all about the customer experience in the very positive value and benefits that advice brings that we all know about. And it was interesting, because at the end of that process, because I made some comments about what is advice and what’s not advice, and one of the comments was, look, if you’ve got over 1000 customers on your books, and some people who call themselves advisors in those days actually had a book of clients that was in the 2000s and above. I said, Look, you know, that’s not advice. That’s something else. You know, you can’t possibly offer advice to that many people, you know, and so I had, at the end of that session, I had a line of people who wanted to beat me up. And they were the old school with the large client books. And there were those that were more interested in the, the idea of their personal brand, and how to fix the industry brand, if you like or industry reputation, and those were the ones that have, you know, I thought got on and did a great job in terms of developing their independent models and cut loose from their licensees and started practicing actual advice, not product distribution.

James Wrigley
Gotcha. Can you talk a little bit about? So you’ve mentioned that in attending an FBA conference and doing a presentation and so forth? Can you give us a little bit of a little bit of a backstory on kind of who’s Bruce, what’s what’s Bruce’s situation and have you you know, what are you doing now, in terms of the communication? What does that actually look like? Yeah. And a bit of the work history to where you are now.

Bruce Madden
Sure, sure. So look, I’m I’m I guess I still identify as a writer and a journalist. That was my vocation, that’s something that I was always drawn to as a child, and I began after university and operating in different, different industries. And I was drawn via a friend across to the David Koch house. David, back in the day, ran a number of financial publications and did a lot of consumer finance, but he hadn’t money management. In amongst his stable, David was one of the founding editors of money management, which has now 30 odd years, you know, still running after he is servicing the sector. Yeah. So I joined I joined David at about the same time that Paul Keating and the Labour government of the day 1992 created the Superannuation Guarantee system, the SG system of mandated superannuation. And interestingly enough, Keating, at that time, had the reputation for as the Godfather, if you like of financial planning. So until that time, there were agents, there were advisors that were doing interesting things within the larger institutions, but because suddenly, everyday Australians had superannuation accounts to look after and weren’t automatically going on the the age pension. That system, you know, was quite revolutionary, and it spawned a lot of activity from the asset management production side. So the fundamentals, and then the advisors giving advice to to customers, so I joined money management, circa mid 1990s. I think, just after that, the creation of the SGX system. I then went on to do a lot of different media. It launched some publications, I launched another magazine called asset at the Fairfax group. It was part of the b&w media organization, it went on for about 10 years until it was subsumed by the Financial Review the the ASR. We’re now in the early 2000s. And I started in consulting so I started in public relations and my company now Madden and Associates where we’re just one PR agency of the year in 2023, which is wonderful and We were a small, we’re a boutique firm, and we have some financial advice organizations on our books very proudly, we’ve worked with a number of great financial advisory firms, we’ve helped launched firms where there was a business back in the day that was called centric wealth. It’s still exist. And it’s, it’s been rolled up into other other another group. But through that process, I’ve met a lot of great advisors who who are actually advisors not Not, not the other form that I mentioned earlier. But when I

James Wrigley
think of PR, and I don’t know, maybe it’s just the new cycle. When I when I think of PR it’s, I automatically go to Arno something bad’s happened. And I need someone to help me manage the fallout from from this thing that that hasn’t been

Bruce Madden
the spin doctor. Yeah.

James Wrigley
Is that just what it is in the TV shows? Or is that what it is in real time? Need PR? What is it? What is it? It’s a

Bruce Madden
great question. So and this is why I don’t like the term PR, because it has so much ambiguity around here, who get that sort of classic Hollywood PR guy is the spin doctor or the person that indulges in the dark arts, spinning a client out of trouble, you know, that, that sort of style. But I think, from my point of view, coming from a very, very strong journalism, background and having had, you know, exposure to a whole range of different mediums and audiences and, and, you know, obviously, taking the line of the transparency, integrity, truth, those things matter. So, you know, that’s all part of your moral compass. So for us, PR is all about those things. It’s been transparent, it’s been transparent to the media that we’re talking to on a daily basis, but also with the client. Importantly, it’s no different to financial advice and advisors. As a professional services business, you, you need that level of mutual trust and respect and integrity with your clients. So that that’s certainly guides what we do. And in effect, PR is a bit of a misnomer. For us, it’s more that we are communication strategists. So we do our best work where there’s reputation issues involved. Some of our some of our work that we’re most proud of, you will never see in the media because it’s helped avoid a crisis, it’s helped to communicate well, internally inside an organization. An example might be a cyber event where there’s a fraud that’s been committed, and were that not managed well, and, you know, and legally and resolved, and then you could have had, you know, chaotic sort of consequences on the outside turns of public run on a superfund for example, or banking, that sort of thing.

James Wrigley
kucha in terms of communication. So, you know, obviously, we’re communicating now just talking, we’re all as advisors, we’re communicating with our clients, and there might be staff and all the rest of it, like, Do you have any, any tips on, on, on when I say, How can I be an effective communicator?

But what does that even mean? But like, what, how

can you know anyone that’s listening? Can they Is there is there something that they can take from this about? How can they communicate better? Or is it something along those lines, you can ask

Bruce Madden
the great question and, you know, I’ve done a lot of media training, actually within financial licensees and for the, the advisors that want a media profile, it’s an important part of understanding that when you’re communicating, it’s, it’s rarely about yourself, it’s, it’s about the audience that you’re targeting. And particularly if you’re talking via the Channel of media, but I think one of the things I love to raise in those sessions is to talk about the power of three. So three is a magic number. And if you have just three things that you want to convey to a client or to an audience, you will invariably win them over and satisfy their need for information. If you give them four, that’s one too many. And they forgotten what the first one is good. If you give them two, then you’re a deal. You don’t know what you missed out and you don’t know what you’re talking about. So the impression is that three just resolves it. And, you know, this is founded in the teachings of Aristotle. So the ancient Greeks got it right. And from, from the Aristotle point of view, it’s three components of ERATION. ethos, pathos, and logos. Yeah, so ethos being you know, is it the right thing to do? Is it ethical, and pathos is emotion that’s the heart and logos logic the head So you’ve got to get the head, the heart, and you got to do the right thing. And that’s, that’s simply how to be more effective with, you know, with a client or with any audience and, and that goes way beyond just making sure that the SOA is completed and the fact find Stan and the due diligence is all tidied up, it’s actually listening with with, you know, with intent and hearing the client and repeating that back to them. But also utilizing those, those other elements that I’ve just talked about, yep, that’s really important. It’s pretty simple. But a lot of people they get, let their ego or they let their, their own stuff get in the way and don’t allow enough time to listen, in order to, you know, effectively respond to the need, or what that person was actually trying to convey to

James Wrigley
him before we, before we started recording this, you were talking about the power of kind of using anecdotes, things that have happened to you in the past and these kinds of stories. How do you

bring that? Absolutely.

Bruce Madden
So, you know, ever everyone has an opinion, I guess, and opinions, you know, fine in terms of signaling your intent, but it’s the proof. It’s the proof point. It’s the evidence. It’s the statistical data. It’s the case studies, it’s the anecdotes, it’s the stories that won me over when we created the financial planner of the Year Award and money management in the early the mid 90s. And I changed up the protocol for that all the judging criteria. So it wasn’t just a popularity contest, it we had to, we asked advisors to send in client testimonials, actual written. So what we got was incredible in URL in the mid 90s. So it was, we got birthday cards that were sent from clients, we got letters that are written long, long handwritten tones of wonderful examples of proving the quality of the advice. And you know, what happened when I had an accident. And then we had to lodge a claim on the insurance and how the advisor turned up at my house and sat down at the kitchen table. And we worked through it, and then we worked out what we’re going to do with all the money and I owe all of my, you know, my current, good, good fortune to the role that this person played in my life. So it’s really powerful. So it, you know, people will buy from people, people trust people. And I think that if you show them not tell them, then, you know, you’re doing a really good job to to get that efficacy and your communication to really show that you mean business.

James Wrigley
So we’re, we’re recording this, this episode that, you know, the day after the quality of advice, kind of reforms and whatever you want to call, it’s just been just been announced. You know, are we at a point or, you know, will we ever be at a point where we’re financial advice is kind of regarded as a profession in the vein of accountants and doctors and those kind of things. And yeah, that was announcements in the last 24 hours,

help or hinder that?

Bruce Madden
Yeah, it’s, it’s an excellent question. And James, I’ve asked myself this question in consecutive decades since the 1990s. So let me let me phrase it this way. And if if just indulge me for a minute as I walked back up there, and let’s go back to 92, right with the SG and Keating and the birth of financial planning through that, that process. That was a Labour government that brought that that policy in, we now have another Labour government. So fast forward some 31 years. And yet another review, on top of another review on top of another review, on ad nauseam, on the financial services sector, and in particular, the advice the advice sector, so the quality of advice review was supposedly about providing greater access and affordability to all Australians to what has become a very rare commodity, which is quality financial advice due to the lack of numbers of advisers we have too few trying to serve a lot of people. But it’s It’s curious to me that, you know, essentially the same system of SG that launched financial planning also launched the industry funds and the power the great power that the superannuation sector now wields in terms of its $4 trillion and growing mandated growth. extraordinary legacy for the Keating. But it also means that the minister or the assistant treasurer, when he announced this week, the findings of his year long review of the levy document, he chose to sit down with a bunch of executives from the superannuation industry to give them a heads up first go at what he was planning. So, you know, it’s, this is all this is all political in a sense, but it’s got kind of an interesting cycle to it, doesn’t it? It’s a 30 year cycle of incredible growth. But what does it mean for advisors, I think those that have survived and those that are attracted to this sector have probably in my career, it’s the first genuine real go at creating that quality professional, client focused profession that that has, has long been, you know, sought by the by the financial planners that, that I respect, some of whom have now retired in frustration, but those that I respect and who persevere, you know, they’re on the cusp of something really great, but we can’t do it in terms of lifting the heavy task of getting more holiday advice into more Australians hands without the without the superannuation funds, and that sort of limited advice model that has been proposed.

James Wrigley
Yeah, it’s as a, as a kind of a communication expert. It’s interesting to pick your brain on the forum in which they that that was that was announced. And, yeah, clearly that was done on purpose, but but, you know, the, what do you think it means by by, you know, having it launched in a particular forum like it was,

Bruce Madden
so having having worked on the inside of the Financial Planning Association during the, the 2012 13 period when another Labour government was in power, and it was a young Chris Bowen who introduce the FOFA reforms, which brought in legislative fiduciary duty, the best interest test and, and that, that future financial advice was meant to be at that time, the be all and end all and in the hopes law of how to regulate the industry. And it was all and I remind people as well, the that was then about access and affordability. here that was the government’s being on what that reform was, was was about but proudly for me, I was on the inside with the with the FPA, who was a client of mine at the time and worked with then chair and the, in the leadership group on making sure that the ban on conflicted remuneration was legislated and making sure that that it stuck, because it was a there was an important barrier that was preventing decent quality professional advice and a profession to finally emerge. Yeah. So I think, you know, we’ve now got to your question about the choice of the of the strategy to roll out the much anticipated release of the quality of advice review. I think it was partly a slap in the face to those people who have done all the heavy lifting on from the, from the industry point of view, from the advice industry point of view, from the advice profession point of view, and to choose to enlist or you know, pre brief, the superannuation funds industry funds. Yeah, I took that as, as a bit of as a bit of a slap in the face, certainly to the existing professional bodies. So the the f triple A, and also to the Financial Services Council, which represents the product manufacturers, who also have a stake in this in some ways, but look, they did, they did manage to pre brief our mate Alex mickiewicza, the AFR, so he got, he got the scoop. So they you know, it’s a it says all the politics and the strategizing that, that I understand how that works, but I know, I know that there’s been a pretty heavy media shedule that Stephen Jones has been on the talking circuit talking up why there’s some 5 million Australians about to retire who need advice, can’t afford it. The best way to do it is through the fiduciary, you know, framework of their superannuation fund, etc, etc. But there’s no discussion about really that core issue of how do we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past where we allow limited advice models to basically become holes Sell distribution mechanisms to rip people off. Because I’ll remind people again that you know that that Chris Bowen foe first scenario that only came about because in 2009, we’re at the we’re at the aftermath of the storm financial that collapse, and also Oprah’s prime another major collapse and you know these legislative reactions, follow those enormous you know, those enormous kind of heartbreaking stories that happen when you have the wrong people doing the wrong thing with other people’s money.

Unknown Speaker
You bring it, you bring a

James Wrigley
really interesting conversation to the table, and you do some work with some with with financial advisors and financial, lots of businesses around their communication and so forth. But then you’ve got this bit of history of being, you know, on the inside with the FPGA, or, you know, whoever else that might be. So it’s an interesting perspective that you can bring to it. And then yes,

Bruce Madden
thank you, James, I think it’s quite unique. But, you know, there was some other organizations that I’ve also worked on the inside by, for example, the formation of the after the financial complaints authority, which which came out of what used to be called falls the Financial Ombudsman Service, so when it when it formulated, we were asked to help communicate it and to work with the new CEO and the board at that time, and sort of now that that happened, just just on the eve of the Hain royal commission. So we also got dragged into, into the Hain Royal Commission on the basis that much of the evidence that was brought beforehand, and in the came through that commission, was sourced through the Africa case file. So there was a lot of crossover there in terms of, you know, evidence to support the prosecution of wrongdoing by some of the larger institutions. So we’ve now seen as a result of that, those same institutions have exited the advice space that they’ve sold up and moved on. And, you know, back in the day, then I was preparing witnesses for that, if you remember the hygiene, the royal commission process it was, and talking about reputation that it was, it was really, you know, you had a single camera on the witness in the stand, being grilled by by the lawyers and over certain events that they had to recall over some years. And there’s, there was no real opportunity for giving contextual background to any of those events, so that the people were really it was a perception medium of the highest order. And you are guilty, unless proven otherwise. Really difficult times. But look, that’s that’s a moment, another sort of footnote in history, but a very important one, really, and, and the thing I’m trying to lead up to is that all of these things matter. All of this history matters in the minds, particularly those 5 million Australians that are those boomers that are about to retire that the minister, Minister Jones, the Assistant Treasurer talks about, you know, they’ll have memory of that stuff, they’ll have memory of these issues. And it’s an important part of this discussion. I think James is trust, you know, how do we, how do we install trust in the minds of that that cohort of people? Or do we? Or do we just look to the younger cohort of people who have also need help, and the next generations, I think that’s another incredibly important part of the puzzle here.

James Wrigley
I guess it kind of circles back to what we’re saying at the start around kind of advisor or advice, reputation, that this kind of building blocks of the story that these 5 million people that are going to be heading into retirement that we’re all supposed to try and help in one way, shape or form. Yeah, they’ve got some story of, you know, what they’ve been reading in the in the press and wherever else. And they’ll form an opinion before they are,

Bruce Madden
they will, but they’ll also be guided by their immediate social group. And, you know, if you’re talking about advice as an organization, as a corporate reputation, say, then we know that there are certain levers or factors that really coefficients like that help determine corporate reputation. So, you know, it’s things like your social responsibility. It’s the profitability of your of your organization to a certain point. So think about the bank. banks are fairly results, record profits, so billions of dollars in record profits. That’s a good thing if you’re a shareholder, but not so good thing if you’re a mortgage holder under pain of increasing cash rates. And so there’s a, there’s a dilemma there, right? They need, there’s a corporate reputation issue. So those two parts, it’s like a balancing act. So they would look at that and go, Well, we now need to dial up other parts of our reputation. So we’ll start to increase the communication in the market around our social responsibility. So I don’t know if you’re a Westpac, you might start running ads on the rescue helicopter, that new sponsor that saves lives, or you might look at other aspects of how you need to develop community relations or how you’re giving back. And that is all designed to offset you know, the downside or negative impacts of having too much profit. So it’s, it’s a constant dynamic, and this is the this is the sort of, it sounds quite cynical, doesn’t it? When you think about it, in that you’re actually managing it from his point of view, it’s not, but you must manage it. And that’s, that’s the message to anyone in business, really, that you really should understand. What constitutes reputation and how to manage it, and because reputation at its heart is what others think about you and what others say about you. And you’re not in the room, you know, and that’s, that’s incredibly important, particularly, as I said, as we’ve got some, you know, this, this this massive opportunity ahead for financial advice in Australia. Yep. They

James Wrigley
have, you’ve just launched on, you know, fit kind of fill me in on some, like, immediate training of some variety. What, what is that? What is it? What is it, and what’s going on? What’s, what’s the plants,

Bruce Madden
so our message, serve media training really is, again, we do a lot, we’re actually in the middle of a major round of helping a top 10 ASX company who’s just integrated another large business into its fold. So the idea there is that they need, they need those people to be able to essentially communicate off the same consistent hymn sheet, and I had a guy actually, last week turn up and say, very senior guy, you know, similar age to myself 30 years in business, while I’m not here to be turned into some, you know, puppet and some with a with a marketing, you know, a marketing message. And that’s not, that’s not what I’m gonna do well, that’s great, because I’m not here to turn you into a puppet. And that’s not what we do. So it is actually more about understanding how to connect with others and remain authentic in in the in that process. But also more than that, to be much more clear and articulate on how messages are formulated. And what happens when you’re communicating to another human being what they are doing in processing that information and how you need to understand what’s going on in their minds to resolve some questions that will naturally occur when you start to try to convince them of the merit of your, of your thesis or of your position or your advice. So and that’s essentially it’s a media training is really a construct for us to talk about message delivery and effective communication. And,

James Wrigley
and then something specific in that space you’re doing with with female advisors. Is that is that you’re doing something along those lines?

Bruce Madden
Yes. So recently, absolutely. So there’s a big issue in representation. While there’s a female representation issue, full stop, but there’s a symbolically more challenging issue in that the media has a very low representation of females when it comes to finance when it comes to the superannuation sector that we’ve been talking about today. And it’s, it’s something like sub 20%. And it’s projected over the next 10 years to get to maybe 34%, in terms of, you know, versus versus male representation as as the voice. Now as a PR firm, we have daily interactions with media and they’re crying out they’re saying, Who have you got that’s a woman that we can profile and I’m keen and have been for some time to help correct that balance, but also to work with organizations that have great women. And I know there’s a lot of organizations who who are seeking to promote on merit the women who are making a really enduring contribution to the industry and to their own careers and juggling so many facets of their family lives and their professional lives. So I, I together together with Vanessa Stojko is an old friend of mine who runs a media content business. We’ve, we’ve pulled together a program to help empower more women, and have them prepared to do and train them and have them set up well to do media. And, you know, to talk about, if they’re a financial advisor to talk about what they do and how they impact others, if they’re working in the product side of the industry to talk about the technical aspects of it or superannuation stuff about, you know, the role that that, that that money can can play positively in the lives of others, not necessarily just women, but women generally have more challenges in terms of equity in pay, but also in time off for families and, and the starting families becoming mums and returning to the workforce. Now, that’s not to say that we’re taking a traditionalist view, it’s just the pragmatics and the reality of society. Yep.

James Wrigley
Bruce, thank you for joining me today. If anyone wants to reach out to you find out a little bit more about what you do this, you know, this skills build the thing that you’ve just been mentioning about trying to build the build some profiles, where can where can people find you? We’ll put some links into the show notes. But for anyone that’s listening, where can we Oh,

Bruce Madden
wonderful. Well, they can they can reach out to us@madden.com that I you? Yes, on the website. Yeah, I could give you all my socials. But I can’t think of them off the top of my head. But we’ll put some links

James Wrigley
into wherever people might be picking this up from one of the podcast platforms or put some get some links from you or put them in there. Wonderful. Bruce, pleasure to have a have a chat with you. Thank you for joining me. I’m sure there’s a fair bit of value in that in this conversation for lots of people.

Bruce Madden
It’s been great to talk talk to you as well. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you.