#405 Ellie Fordham – Transcript

James Wrigley
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I’m James Wrigley, you’ve got the pleasure of speaking with Ellie Fordham today from verse. Ellie. Thank you for joining me.

Ellie Fordham
Thanks for having me, James.

James Wrigley
I’ve seen your name pop up a lot over the years, different places LinkedIn awards and other bits and pieces. It’s great to actually finally, finally speak to the quarry connected us. And thank you, Cory, for Thank you, Cory, for that. So great to have you here. We’re going to bounce around a bit. We were just talking before we press record to say that what what’s the main topic gonna be but we’re gonna bounce around a bit. We’ll talk about video SLAs alleys in Brisbane, we’ll talk about kind of remote work, females in advice, AFA all of these kinds of things. So lots of different topics that will, that we’ll get into. But maybe Ellie, if we maybe we’ll just start off with with the location thing. So you’re relatively recently joined verse. You haven’t been at it a year and a bit by the looks

Ellie Fordham
of trot trot, I think, I think wasn’t

James Wrigley
yesterday, but it wasn’t also wasn’t five years ago, either.

Ellie Fordham
It doesn’t feel like it was yesterday. Sometimes it feels like a lot longer than it is. I think it’s about 14 or 15 months now. Probably 15 months since I joined.

James Wrigley
Yep. And your work that you’re doing at the moment is that I primarily remote with clients, is that face to face? Is it a bit of both? Like what what’s it look like? And they

Ellie Fordham
have probably around 90%? Remote? Yep. Which is a huge change for me. Because in the past, that’s probably seen most my clients, probably about 80% of my clients face to face. Yep. So it’s a huge turnaround, from what I’ve traditionally been used to. And probably something I didn’t think would be possible. Because in Brisbane, we really probably haven’t been impacted by COVID as much as other cities. So I know going through that experience, most of the clients wanted to come back into the office pretty quickly after our first lockdown and meet up in person. So the concept of me working remotely seeing clients across the country and connecting with them and building that relationship, you know, via zoom was pretty new for me. Yeah. But I think it’s been quite successful so far.

James Wrigley
Yep. And so you move to verse was that was that they would have been after COVID Obviously lose track of time when all that happened. I think it was at like three years ago. Now. It doesn’t.

Ellie Fordham
Some people think it’s still going on. I’m not really sure if all but I’ve got clients who still are very much in a bit of a COVID bubble yet? Um, yeah, it was after COVID. So and I think, you know, because versus a Melbourne based company, primarily, a lot of our teens in Melbourne. A lot of those clients are pretty used to cooking remotely. And a lot of the team are used to working remotely as well, because I’ve already experienced this, I had Sonic that set up to be able to make this work really well.

James Wrigley
Prior to verse what we were doing prior to working with us.

Ellie Fordham
So I was working at another practice and independent practice in Brisbane, which was, I guess, a startup that sort of formed and got some legs. I was there to really about five and a half years before working at

James Wrigley
birth. But how does it how does that go? Like you’re talking about kind of first kind of headquarters in Melbourne? Most of the teams down the I’ve been down to the the hub kind of co working space before? Like how did how does that work? Starting a new job interviewing, meeting the team learning the processes, all of these kind of things when you’re at the other end of the country compared to where everyone else is like how does that work?

Ellie Fordham
It was actually so much smoother than I thought. Yeah, I think that’s because we haven’t really well structured processes in place, which is definitely something that attracted me to working with. Dan, who’s our head of Ops is amazing. So he really did a lot of the onboarding. You actually got a good store he hidden away that I was finishing up my old role and I was actually going to Melbourne anyway, I’d already had that plan flown before chatting to Korean and divers to see a friend of mine there. So I met up with the team for dinner. Before I started, came back to Brisbane just start the job. On the first day on Monday. I tested positive for COVID on the Friday. My first week was probably a bit of a mess because I was copying and you know, wasn’t probably 100% That whole week. Classic. I picked up COVID from Melbourne. That’s what I like to think anyway. Yeah, exactly. But you don’t get COVID when there’s hate do that to me. So that was a really interesting experience. But yeah, I think because we do have a really well structured process in place that that really helps in terms of the onboarding. And I think they’ve only gotten better since I’ve started because we’ve on boarded a lot of teammates. Insights died at Battleground pretty quickly. Yeah, I think the other thing though, is that at that stage, the team is working two days a week from from the office and the rest of the time from home. So Um, I was sort of used to working remotely as well. And we have a big team in the Philippines as well. So we were pretty used to trying to connect them remotely, I would say that we all feel very much like we’re part of a team. And so, you know, doing meetings on Zoom, whether people are working remotely or in the office, it’s just like every day. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, I felt like it was quite straightforward. Yep.

James Wrigley
And what what’s the typical client look like, for you adverse? And is it different to what you were doing in your previous role in the previous business you’re working in?

Ellie Fordham
Not particularly different. So I’m really passionate about giving advice to wealth accumulators. So I’ve really enjoyed working with clients who might be the mum and dad with family might be 35 to 55. And they’re doing really well in their career, their time poor, they really need that sort of person to hold them into account to, to achieve the things they want to achieve over time. And make sure they’ve got the right discipline and doing that, but also, they Yeah, a lot of those clients want to live life at the same time. So striking that balance. So that’s sort of this nimbler client to what I was working with in the past, I think I’ve probably got a few more pre retirees now as well, which is exciting. It’s a space that I probably started out my career working in. And that’s always good to sink your teeth into some of those strategies. But that’s probably the typical sort of client I’m seeing at the moment. 35 to 55 year old, so trash? No, I would say

James Wrigley
Yeah. And how are you? How are you engaging with clients? Like, like, I was like to listen to others, ensemble podcast episodes with other people where I’m not the not the host as such. And as some people get really deep into, like, cashflow other people don’t. I’ve tried it as I’ve never made it, click properly. Like, are there elements of the client’s life that you’re working through? And how are you dealing with the different elements,

Ellie Fordham
I think, again, to speak to our process that we go through a verse, once again, another thing that attracted me is the onboarding process. And the client experience is incredible. And the foundation of that really is spending 90 minutes with a current, understanding what their values and their intentions are. I think maybe Cory spoke about this in the past on the numerous podcast, but that really set the foundation for the relationship to understand what is really important to them. The values are real reference point in terms of how they make decisions in life. And it’s often a reflection of some of the experiences that I’ve been through as well. You often get some money stories that come out of that, and childhood experiences, etc. And then the intention is obviously, or some people call them goals, that just as important to understand where they want to be heading in the future, I think that really set the framework for the relationship that you want to build with the client over time that follow the advice is always coming back to making sure they’re achieving those things. Yep, yeah, I do really enjoy getting into the cash flow side of things. And I think a lot of people have spent time trying to work out what’s going to be the right way to make it work and actually operationalize it. And it exists. Because, yeah, and you don’t want to get into the weeds with cash flow, either. Because you can end up spending, the time you’ve got aside, that can be really, really valuable for a client, you don’t wanna be telling them how much they should spend on coffee every day. I think probably that might be a low value add to their overall life, but it is still, I believe, a really important part of how they’re going to pursue their intentions and get them to where they want to be. And that’s why we do spend time talking about cash flow. But we’re not talking about cash in that first session when we’re talking about their attention, that’s for sure. Yeah. So

James Wrigley
that that values and intentions, meeting whatever you want to call it, the kind of interaction you have with the with the client is some structured, you’ve got a gender or something. There’s some structured ways of dealing with that and and how early on in the engagement process with the client. Are you doing that is that the decipher my first 10 minutes? Hi, I’m Ali kind of brief get to know you is that the first major interaction you’re having with them was sitting the process?

Ellie Fordham
Yeah. So from my perspective, when I’m meeting and that probably the first major interaction having that before any client get to that point, they do go through an introductory chat with, you know, one of our advisors or our associated visors. And during that session, we’re finding out what’s really important to them, why they’re reaching out for advice, but we’re also telling them what our process is how we work here at best, and just making sure they got really good expectations of what the next couple of sessions together are going to look like. So they’re really well informed of the fact that they are going to be opening up to their advisor and talking about what’s important to them in that session. And some people do it better than others. But I think the right sort of client I think, for us is one that really embraces that session together. Yep. Because that’s the type of advice that we love providing that goals based advice. And yet, when they really open up and connect with you during that session, it’s really rewarding. It’s probably One of my favorite parts of the job, yeah, you get all sorts of emotions that come out of there, which I think you do with, like a lot of different types of meetings that you have. But it is really well structured, to optimize, I guess, what you need the client to open up about. But also, I think it really does help to build that rapport, especially if you are working remotely, having that structure in place, has been a real added benefit to build the rapport client.

James Wrigley
That’s, that’s an interesting process of how like a client gets to, you know, sitting in front of you for this 90 minute meeting. It’s not necessarily you doing that first introductory, half an hour or whatever it might be say, is it like, how was it? How was that first interaction allocated amongst the team? And then how does someone end up sitting in front of you versus sitting in front of a different advisor? How’s that all worked? Yeah.

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, as we’ve gotten bigger, it’s something that’s sort of evolved a little bit. So we all were, we have time, we’ll go through those introductory chats with clients, I probably do less and less of it these days, because my diary tends to be or what we’re seeing clients. But in the past, though, the introductory chat is sort of allocated based on the availability of advisor and associate advisor. At times where, you know, we think it’s going to be better suited for a client to be in front of a particular associate or a particular advisor, we will adjust who they’re meeting, we know we’re trialing a couple of things as well at the moment to make sure they’re in front of the right person. So we’ll see how successful that is. But then, once they get to that introductory chat, the person that they’re speaking with, instead of identifying what’s important to them, and who’s going to be best placed to help them moving forward. So you know, if it’s a client who’s, you know, working for Centrelink, they might be better placed with chatting to Lucy, or if it’s a client who’s had a TPD, like Michaels really excellent in that area, or, or they’re a pre retiree know, SJ might be the right advisor for them. So that’s sort of how we get a bit of a sense of who’s going to be the right client. And often we’ve got, you know, capacity issues as well. So there might be a bit more space for one advisor rather than other. So we’ve put them in front of who’s available straightaway to make sure we’re keeping the ball rolling. But yeah, generally, we’re trying to get the client, I think we who’s going to be the best advice, but then

James Wrigley
that’s interesting, because it’s something that we’re trying to grapple with at the moment. So we get, and there’s a range of inquiries that come through the business at the moment and and what we’ve been doing, but it can cause some roadblocks in different parts of the process is that if I’m the person that’s done that introductory Converse conversation with the client, I’m typically then the trying to book them into beat with me, if it’s one of the other advisors, they’re doing the same thing. And so you end up with some people that might be really busy in periods of time and and others that are a little bit quieter, rather than having it kind of centrally managed to a degree, which is kind of allocating it out a little bit based on time. But then also matching up the client with the right advisor at the same time, rather than just like he did visit, kind of congeal at that. Sometimes,

Ellie Fordham
yeah, I completely understand that something that I think I’ve worked with in the past and dealt with, whereas I think we’ve sort of got a funnel that going over into the same sort of location coming out of the funnel. And getting the criteria, right, in terms of how it comes out of the funnel, I think is really important. Like I know, I’ve done introductory chats with clients in the past and knowing that they’re going to be much better suited to work with integrator advisor. And once you get into the rhythm of it, it feels really natural to probably place them in the hands of the right person. But I think instinctively and advisable we’d never be used to doing that. We always want to build that relationship on introductory track, you want to keep the ball sort of rolling and keep keep working with them over time. So it’s hard to move away from it for sure.

James Wrigley
Interesting. Thank you that’s giving you getting a bit from this to hopefully, hopefully others listening in are as well. So we’ve kind of tackled the somewhat remote work most of the teams down in Melbourne. So there’s people in Sydney Do you have? Do you have team members? You mentioned the Philippines but other team members in other parts of Australia, maybe not advisors or associates all like what’s what’s the split look like?

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, sir. My my teammate Anna, she lives down on the Mornington Peninsula. So she probably comes maybe a little bit more into the office than I do, but not too much more. And, and is actually on on parental leave at the moment. He has a beautiful little girl with you. So apart from her and myself and the HR team, the rest of the team is based in Melbourne at the moment, but I think that, you know, not to say that if the right person came on board, they don’t necessarily have to live in Melbourne, and on curricula that

James Wrigley
clearly doesn’t matter where they lived us.

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, and yeah, in terms of Yeah, it was probably a really big roadblock for me to join us thinking about working remotely. And I spent plenty of time talking to my friend, Cara Williams. So that sufficient funds about this and she was really helpful because she works 100% remotely and the whole team at 50 funds do. And that really helped me to get through that roadblock. And I think just from a cultural perspective, as well, because so many of us are doing remote work. And again, because the team probably, in the past spent two days a week working in the office, there’s a lot of things that we do as a team, whether it’s like our gratitude sessions, or our team meetings, and different things like that, that are all sort of over zoom that helped us to build that culture, as well, which is, again, really unique. So yeah, I think it still helps us to sort of feel all connected, regardless of what part of the country we’re in.

James Wrigley
I think it’s a it’s a common thing, I was speaking to an advisor at Fox and here that you know, they did their office a little while ago and it’s the same thing there’s a there’s a way you do operating primarily remotely in your in your case, there’s a concerted effort to have these check ins and so forth rather than just leave it to like I’m in the office now and we we tend to not as much as people are half at home half in the office, it’s it’s walking past someone in the hallway way those catch ups are happening whereas you need to make more of an effort where felons remote if we can pivot a little bit into into video. So as I was saying, Before we pressed record, Cory was really generous with spending a fair bit of time with me to just explain from his perspective what you what you’re all doing in the space of video SOA I know use it is a conference or something I saw on LinkedIn he has been talking about it all over the place but but it’d be good to hear from from you as an advisor where the very last day just getting an up and running here but uh yet to actually present these video essays. Can you talk me through the from your side that you know, the transition from a traditional paper based PDF, maybe you know, 60, odd page SOA, to, to what you’re now operating how you’re delivering advice. Now? Can you talk us through what that’s like?

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, I think everyone started doing it a little bit differently with video SLAs. And, like thinking about my experience and learning how to present I guess advice documents, your SOP over time, although we all hate the fact that it’s 60 pages or more. It’s kind of like a little bit like a security blanket in a way because it’s got all of the benefits and risks and all the things that you need to go through in there. So when Cory told us that he had spent a whole weekend thinking about video essays and using his kids bedroom, and whiteboard, to map out how this process is going to happen. I thought he’s crazy. But it is it’s been so beneficial for our clients, and just in terms of making our life easier. And probably my only initial apprehension was that that sort of security blanket is taken away. But aside from that, it has been amazing. And the response from clients is fantastic. Especially clients who received other forms of advice documents in the past as well. You can almost sort of talk about and I think is like a value add for the client. You know, do you remember getting a 60 page advice document in the US? Yes, well, ads is 25 pages, and six of them are pictures. I think also for us though, the video essays kind of work well, in turn is about overall client engagement process. You know, a lot of the stuff we’re doing is remote, we use a lot of visual tools throughout client process. And then the video SOA really lends itself an extension of that process. Yeah. So how we do it is we have a summary of advice, about 25 pages in length. And there’s still some from five pages in now, unfortunately, can’t get away from them as much as we read through the asset guide. We still need them in there for the cover page, who’s providing the advice, all those sorts of things,

James Wrigley
the word statement of advice and those kinds of things. Yeah,

Ellie Fordham
exactly. Yeah. But in terms of the actual content, you know, the really good stuff is probably about two or three pages long in terms of the summary. And then you’ve got a couple of pages, which your product replacement tables in there. And we develop that summary of advice. I think it saves the team a lot of time in putting that document together. No doubt, there’s still plenty of work to do in terms of getting all the compliance side right, then once that’s prepared, and we review it, every advisor will prepare a slide deck that goes alongside that summary of advice and will bring up any other sort of visual aids, you know, it might be a website for a circle fund or it might be some some data from a particular fund manager that you want to bring up alongside that or I often just drop them into my slide deck as well. And we use a slide deck to really present the advice and talk about the concepts that we’re working through. And that’s probably got the better reaction I think from clients in that if they read through the advice stuff came in, it’s actually easy to read, they understand it. And then when you giving them the context with the slide deck and the other resources, they really get it. Yep. And the other thing that we do is because the advice document is much smaller, we actually set it out to the client a couple of days before the meeting. Because they could actually read it, most of the time they’ve read through it, and they, they get most of the advice already, they’re already engaged in kind of ready to go. So it’s almost like a formality of the advice to speak. So the last part of that is that we do some modeling. And there’s all different tools out there in terms of what you can use for the modeling. But I think that really wraps up the whole advice process. Well, because we’re providing goals based advice. Yeah. And if you can visualize that through the modeling and spend more time with the client, showing them what their trajectory looks like, and when they can do the things that they want to do, or that’s trade off to see the modeling is a great tool to do that. And you can actually spend more time then delivering value to the client of what’s important to them, and less time on the compliance side of things.

James Wrigley
So are you doing that modeling? So there’s, it sounds like this, there’s kind of three elements to it, there’s this 25 page document, sorts that your your paraplanning teams putting that together? So you got this 25 page document, you’re then putting together a slide deck, which does that reference back to that documents? So when you’re presenting to the client? are you presenting a presenting this 25 page document? Or you’re you’re said that to them beforehand, and you’re really just presenting the slide deck? And then A and then the last part is the modeling? Like are you doing that live with the client? Or how is that all has all come together?

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, so in terms of the summary of advice in the slide deck, I’m probably chopping and changing between the two of them. Because the clients have read over the advice document before the meeting, obviously still need to go through the whole thing, which then but it makes it easier to go through it with them. So sort of chopping and changing into between the two of them. In terms of the modeling, it’s all prepared and ready to go before the meeting. And then I’m showing them live in the meeting what that modeling workflow. At times, I won’t necessarily do it, it depends on the client. Because what we do is we actually record a video illustrating the modeling and showing them what it looks like for the client, going through all the assumptions. And that goes into the SharePoint folder, the clients receipts, I can come back and look at it whenever they you know, I’m not sure how many clients actually doing look at it so far. But you know, I met with a client yesterday afternoon, and we were just talking about her retirement, she actually said, you know, every time there’s anytime there’s ever self doubt, I want you to come back and look at that bowling video and just remind yourself that you are on the right trajectory, things are going well, we ended the things we want to do. So yeah, that’s sort of the last piece that wraps it together. So in that SharePoint baldy they have a summary of advice that the project meaning slides at the modeling, recording, and any other tools that are important to go in there as well.

James Wrigley
So that there’s a way where you’re on the cusp of doing it paraplanning team is putting the finishing touches on this kind of summary of advice document that you refer to. So we started off with the read the whole FPA PowerPoint presentation, and then we’re going oh, what are we going backwards and forwards. And we’re going with this summary thing. The bit that scares me is the modeling because I don’t know how to do it. Like I didn’t spend any time I didn’t spend any time in power planning. All the modeling is done by our power planning team. Fortunately, my associate advisor has done a whole lot of time, the power of planning, and Ken knows all of that stuff inside out. So if we were to do the modeling, I could have him come along to the meeting. And he’d be the one to be able to bring it up and adjust it if necessary. But I’ve no idea myself,

Ellie Fordham
well, that’s probably my one downfall as well, James, I’ve spent a lot of time power planning over the course of my career. And I’ve always known how to do kind of every job across the business. And this is the first time I can actually say I have no idea how to do that. So I am slowly learning the modeling a bit more over time, and there is my teammates are much better at doing it. Yeah. But um, I guess as long as you can present to it, that’s the main role. And yeah, when you’ve got a great team around, you can prepare it beforehand, definitely makes it a lot easier

James Wrigley
comfortable presenting the nice graphs and things that come that spit out of it, but but asked me to say Oh, you got that number wrong, or what if I do this? What if I do that to try and do alive? freaks me out. I need to spend a bit of time sorting it out. So So you get your client, your client into a recipient of some of this. They’re enjoying it. They’re really liking it. You mentioned at the start referring back to the old documents, but it’s even existing clients that have had it the old way, preferring it the new way. Yeah,

Ellie Fordham
yeah, definitely. And even clients that I’ve sort of on board and who received advice elsewhere in the past, I’ve often apprehensive about getting a long winded sort of document. So yeah, I think they’ve been really receptive of it. And and owning especially the Visualize nation, you know, the tools that we use the slide deck to help understand the concepts. And it’s also really important that just just as much as a summary, but

James Wrigley
I think it ties in with the way that you’re fairly interacting with the clients, like most of your meetings you’re doing online, if you’re using all these visual tools, and so forth, in the whole process leading up to it. And then you turn around and say, Oh, here’s my 65 page document that we’re going to scroll through, and I’m going to pick apart a few things. I suspect the summary of advice is probably just those key things that you would have been scrolling backwards and forwards to, when you’re presenting the advice any, yeah, if you’re putting that document in front of

Ellie Fordham
it. So we’ve got a bunch of the team that still do meetings in the office, by clients request it and it still works really well. in person as well, you know, sharing on a screen and jumping between different documents and modeling, it still works really well. We do record all those sessions together as well. So I actually met with a client in person yesterday to present a video SOA, and we still record the session for compliance purposes, but it still works really quite well. And I think just coming back to you comment there around the things that you probably picking out anyway, from your boss documented going through, when I was a paraplanner. I remember, you know, printing out the advice document many years ago and putting it into a binder. And you know, they were really long winded documents, and I remembers a bunch of the binders I was working with, I actually like sticky notes at the pages that they wanted to present. And, you know, to think how far we’ve come that we were getting away from that maybe we’ll have a new version of a boss document, and the next sort of 12 months or so we’ll see how that all unfolds. It’s definitely I think improving the experience for clients I heart in the context of the legislation that

James Wrigley
just I guess clarity for anyone that that’s listening that that the in person meetings where you’re presenting advice in person, although kind of calling it a video SOA, you still recording that through zoom or, or whatever it is. So you’re firing up zoom, screen sharing through zoom, but onto the TV that might be on the wall in the meeting room or something like that.

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, that’s right. Perfect. So you know, moving the camera around, say, Hey, this is James. James is here in person getting advice today? Yeah. Just for compliance purposes that it can’t so I’ve seen that money, but aside from that, still getting the same experience and sharing onto the TV. Yep.

James Wrigley
And then maybe last topic to tackle your kind of involvement with the FPA. Obviously merged with the sorry with the with the AFA, obviously merged with the FPA. Recently, can you talk us through what your involvement has been there? Is there anything ongoing that you’re doing there now, with the with the merged group, like what’s, what’s it been like for you?

Ellie Fordham
So I started doing away with AFA a few years ago, and I got nominated for an award and went through that whole process got to meet a bunch of great people out of the AFA. And, yeah, sort of as part of that, they were talking about doing different events, and I thought I can help with some of their events. So started helping them out. That led me to being part of the Inspire group, which is a big part of the AFA. It’s one of the subcommittee’s it’s about really promoting women in a bar. And the last couple years, I can’t remember how long I’ve been the co chair and now I’m the chair of the Queensland chapter, women’s wire. So moving forward, we’ve obviously merged together, which is great means I don’t have to pay to membership associations anymore. Or you are both a member of both. I’ve has Yeah. So but I think more than anything, it’s a great thing for the industry that have one voice representing us. And I am the Queensland chapter chair moving forward for Inspire. And I think in southeast Queensland, over the last few years, we’ve probably been doing a lot of events as a combined entity anyway, which is great. And we’ve really come together as a sort of FPA group pretty well, I think over the last six months. And we’ve got a bunch of events planned already. So as part of the broader F AAA group, we’ve got an end of financial year event coming up in a couple of weeks. And I’ve been pretty heavily involved in helping to organize that, which is going to be great to sort of, I think, celebrate the success of people that have really contributed to both those organizations over the past period of time and over AFA it’s a 70 year history. It’s pretty significant. That’s

James Wrigley
a long time. Yeah,

Ellie Fordham
it is. It’s huge. Like we got an email that came out on Friday, just to say, you know, this is officially the end of that chapter. And as someone who’s only really been part of the NFA for a very short period of time relative to 70 years. I think it was a bit emotional and I think some of the people that I work with in that organization and on a regular basis they’ve been really longtime members, I think it was a sad day for them. But it’s also signifying, moving forward into the future, I think, you know, a voice, which is great. So that the events can sort of celebrate some of that history, but sort of Ford our legacy in terms of what we’re going to do moving forward. So we’ve got a few sort of other events planned for the rest of the about permanent spa perspective. Now, our role is really that connecting women together, and promoting women and uplifting men, and not just advisors or, you know, support staff in the industry, it’s about our industry partners as well, because they have a big role to help in terms of supporting, getting more women into the industry. So we ran a really successful networking event last year, were able to get some great sponsorship, which really lowered the costs, which meant that it was easier for us to get, you know, a great CSOs and paraplanners, and other people’s students to come along to that event. I think a particular highlight for me was having a few students there. Because they really got a lot out of the event. Yeah. So we’ve got something like that planned in the works as well. And it’s likely we’re going to merge up, we’re likely going to do that as a combined to that with another group that promotes women in the industry, to try and make sure we get as many people as we can there and at the successful one.

James Wrigley
Yeah, that’s it. Where can people find out more about these in these events, if they’re interested in coming along?

Ellie Fordham
Yeah, well, the f triple A website has a lot of great detail on there. I know that the end of financial year event got launched this week, on the AAA website. It’s also all over LinkedIn, if you want to have a look at LinkedIn. But Reno, there is a great events team of AAA, who helped put a lot of these events together. And they do a great job of making sure they’re on the website. And when we have more details on some of the other events later in the year, they’ll be up there to add some of those

James Wrigley
in so those inspire events. They’re kind of more southeast Queensland focused. You are they are is there like Melbourne and Sydney equivalents of things going on?

Ellie Fordham
There is so across the country that our share of Inspire in every state, how nice and we are organizing the ones fought for Queensland. So at the moment, in sort of, I guess over the past couple of years, they’ve been more focused on daddy’s going live. But one of the things that the AFA NFPA did really well is they came together and had a North Queensland roadshow, which was fantastic. I wasn’t able to make it, unfortunately. But I know a lot of the other people that are in the in the group went along and thought it was really successful. And I think there’s might be plans to do that. Again, I’m not 100% Sure. But as someone who spent quite a bit of my career in North Queensland, I’m pretty passionate about that. And I’d love to bring in SPIRE to the regions a little bit more I think, perhaps the appetite for inspires a little bit different. It’s not something the regions I used to I know, when I was working out there. There wasn’t a lot of industry events that went on. So people were probably used to networking with others and frequently. But I think you can get a lot out of going that, you know, this is how we’re connected. Now. I’ve met lots of great people in the industry. It’s really what ensembles all about. So yeah, it’d be great to do that a bit more in the regions and bring different types of advice in the way people do business to the region a bit more. Yeah.

James Wrigley
Well, thanks, Ellie. We might just wrap it up there. Thank you for joining me today. I’ve picked up a lot just from myself. Write down some notes. Oh, we’ve got to do this thing and do that thing. So I’m sure there’s a whole lot of value for others that might be listening as well. Ellie, you’ve been really generous with your tax IQ for spend time having a chat this morning.

Ellie Fordham
No problems. Thanks, James. Thank you.