#421 Conaill Keniry – Transcript

James Wrigley
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I have the pleasure of speaking with Conaill Keniry today. We’re just saying I was just saying to Conail, before I press record, normally I’ll do a bit of an intro of who you are and what you’re up to. But you’ve got a few different things going on. I’ve thought I’d throw to you and you give us your intro about the different businesses and things that you’ve got. And what you’re up to at the moment?

Conaill Keniry
Thanks, James. Thanks for having me. Yes, sometimes it’s hard when I answered the phone, and I’m say, Hey, this is called from, you know, what I say next is not always the easiest thing. So we have an advice practice, which is what if advice, we have two, we run two different AP cells. So cobalt and beryllium advisors. And then we also have the advisor games, which is like an advisor events based business. So yeah, we’re up to a few things at the moment.

James Wrigley
Yep. And so two, two licenses. That’s interesting. What, what’s the difference? We’ll get into the licensing in a bit more detail later on. But what’s the difference between the two licenses that you’re running what’s said about? Look, they’re very,

Conaill Keniry
very, they are very similar, in a lot of ways they are parallel to each other. There’s a few different authorization differences. But, you know, we had a choice to change the authorization of one license or get a second license, there was just a few internal strategic reasons why we did it. And think of it like brother sister licenses, you know, they are all intertwined. Whenever we do things, we speak to all the advisors that whole. And yeah, we just like go through the periodic table.

James Wrigley
And it’s, you mentioned advisor games, I didn’t actually realize before, you mentioned that you were behind all of that way. My LinkedIn feed last week was, was full of posts of financial advisors, and others, seemingly running around the city. Doing something up to some challenge, what what was that? What was that all about? Can you tell us?

Conaill Keniry
Oh, yeah, so we are building it, we are advisors running our business, running our license. And I think the theme that you’ll get from us as we do just look at things with fresh eyes, and from the perspective of the advisor. So, you know, last year, we did a PD day for our advisors. And we thought, hey, let’s try and make this, you know, unique and interesting. But it was still a bunch of people sitting in a room staring at slides. You know, yeah, we had some trivia, we had some fun fit elements to it. But it still had that same format. So this year, we’re like, what can we do different? We sat down and asked the advisors, well, what do you want out of these types of advisor gets togethers. And the overwhelming response was advisors want to speak to other advisors, they want to know about their business, they want to have that peer interaction. We then went and talked to BDMS and said, I will you want out of the, you know, industry events, and they wanted genuine interaction with advisors. Like, they don’t necessarily want to be standing out talking in front of slides, they want to be speaking one on one and knowing people’s names. So then from that, we’re like, great, what can we do, and it just evolved into this advisor games. This one was the amazing race. So it was 50, advisors, 10 teams, five people per team. And we had nine stops, which were the sponsors that I started here in the office, got a clue found the next job, got to the first job, which was, let’s say Morningstar, they then had to navigate a challenge at that stop. And then once they finish the challenge, they get the next killer to go to the next place. Yeah, it was a full day event. And it went ridiculously well, I was kind of shocked by how well it went, how much fun the advisors had, how much fun the BDMS have, you know, you do one of these events, and you just don’t know, like, are the advisors gonna go too hard and go to the pub, or, you know, do one or two stops, and, you know, you just disappear as you know, we’ve all known to do at some of these events. But no, it was the opposite. They were literally sprinting out the door. So much so that the day went quicker than I was expecting, like my timings for the day across, you know, 10 stops, etc. They went faster than I was expecting to do. They were that enthusiastic.

James Wrigley
Yeah, maybe say something about the kind of the personality traits of an advisor, this may be a bit of competitiveness in them. And that’s it. If I want to win this thing, even though it’s, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I still want to win this thing. And as I go

Conaill Keniry
100% The second we said go that we’ve caught on record like a via here in the office, which was like the GamesMaster saying, hey, these your instructions go. And I think as soon as it said, Go, that competitive side kind of, you know, snapped on and they were off. And then even at the dinner that night, you know, we gave away prizes in first place. People kept coming up to me say can I see the scorecard? I wonder where we went and how much do we miss it by? And so I need to actually release the scores. I’ll put them on LinkedIn soon.

James Wrigley
So what was the scoring element behind it? What What was that about?

Conaill Keniry
Okay, so it was thinking of it like time. So how long does it take you to travel from point A to point B, that’s your time and then at the first stop, how you perform gives you a score, and that takes time off your total time, if that makes any sense. So there was that and then the third The scoring element was posting on LinkedIn. So if you take a photo of the sponsor of your team and posted on LinkedIn, you get one bonus point. Again, I was expecting people to do a few, There ended up being 500 posts 150,000 impressions on LinkedIn. So again, that went a bit crazy than we were expecting

James Wrigley
is there was a, I didn’t pay too much attention to the individual people posting. But yeah, if I opened up my LinkedIn feed a couple of times on the day that you were doing it and there’s different the same person was checking in here and the check the year in here a different stops. So that worked well with luck with the purpose behind it was that just really to get advisors together, give them some, some, maybe a little bit more relaxed environment to to talk amongst each other. Like it’s not a CPD type type event.

Conaill Keniry
Not not not so much. It is. So of the 50 advisors, 30 of them were our advisors, and then 20 were from external. So I think there’s a bunch of the advisors out there do get lost in the industry, maybe it’s a self license firm, they’ve got two or three advisors, they just don’t have that same connection to the to the rest of the industry. So we sometimes just do drinks in the office and invite local advisors to come have a drink. So it’s a bit more community building than anything else. You know, you don’t know what you don’t know and meeting different people. When I was creating the teams, it was a bit like organizing a wedding where you’re trying to put the right people within the right teams. And, you know, yeah, I people, lots of people came up to me and said, You know, I just spent six hours with these people I never would have otherwise, I never would have spoken to them otherwise. And they are now I got a contact that I have for life. And I think that’s the point.

James Wrigley
i If you don’t already, I reckon you’ll have like a waitlist for the next one that you do. Run it for adviser side.

Conaill Keniry
On the day, we got emails from both sides, because they saw the activity. So the next one we’re doing is in Melbourne on the seventh of March. And then we’re going to do Sydney two weeks later on the 21st of March. This first one is a bit of a trial where yeah, we’ll do those in I literally just googled what’s the best month for weather in Melbourne. And that’s how we picked March. And then there’s other things so advisor games is the is the headline, these are amazing races. But there’s a plenty of other stuff we can do. Charity, poker advisor Olympics, I’ve got a bunch of ideas or we have a bunch of ideas for other things.

James Wrigley
There’s there’s a, there’s a like a standalone business just in that isn’t there writing or running these. There’ll be more social events, for advisors that, as you said, feel feel somewhat lost. And I guess that’s a bit of part of the ensemble community as well. By and large. It’s it’s people that are in fairly small practices that are part of the community. Just another means to get them together because like the networking drinks and a BDM puts on some creeks. And yeah, there’s there’s the normal conference thing where you sit there and as you said, you listen to all these slides and then add an SR, there’s some networking drinks at the agnostics or advocate for five people in the neighborhood just disappears. So

Conaill Keniry
even like I’m a fairly extroverted person, I’m happy to kind of go up and say goodbye to somebody. But even at those events, you speak to the person to your left to your right. And that’s about it coming up to somebody on the other side of the room, you never even know that we’re there. So I think you’re right, the ensemble community is fantastic. And I push a lot of people to that. But it’s is very online, I think it’s just there is also an element of more face to face stuff, which you guys do, but just getting especially locally, like I’ve said to a lot of advisors, jump on the advisor, register the which advisor live local to you and say let’s catch up for a coffee. Yeah, I would say by and large advisors are very open to catching up and having a chat and making connections. Because every advisor has something to give to another advisor, whether it’s experience or tech, or strategy or whatever it is, there’s so much collaboration in this industry and I don’t think we’re competing against each other.

James Wrigley
It’s it’s interesting, you comment on that, that that like advisors being local to you, I went to a it was a product CPD type session not far from my house I don’t live too far away from it’s at an airport down here in Melbourne and it was the first was the first time one of these product manufacturers or somebody had done an event in this particular location that there’s a there’s a hotel it is at an airport and they’ve done it then just because it was local on the car yeah, I’m gonna go work from home that day and and go along. And there was turns out there was one at one of the dads from school that I happen to bump into a few weeks early and turned out he was a financial advisor otherwise it I wouldn’t have known that, you know, it gives me and so it was I know it felt better going to something smaller kind of closer to home. There’s a bit of a strip of local shops and there’s some lawyers and accountants and things nearby that I worked in the city primarily and And those events are full of people in their suits. And they go in and they get their thing. And then they disappear. It was, it was there was a lot more chatter in in just that local event. And there was probably only 30 or 40 people, it was a fairly small event.

Conaill Keniry
But then you’re right, there’s something to be said. So, community is searching for a stance. Yeah, even just things like Who else can I refer to in the in the local area, who is a good accountant who is good there. So it was good that we go to the same school that we had other side of sporty clubs, there is a lot of power in that. And that’s kind of what we say to some of the new advisors join a license, you know, we’re trying to grow leads and grow their business, we just sort of say get involved in the community.

James Wrigley
Yeah, that’s maybe DRO segue into into the licensing part of of what you’re up to. So we briefly caught up at the ensemble of it in in Sydney, a little while back. And we were chatting about a lot of people that I talked to as part of the podcast and just general comments through through their community around and small businesses, they might be one or two people, maybe they’ve got some support staff more often than not those support staff are overseas. And it’s there’s some challenges that some of these smaller businesses face. And then a number of them eventually can talk about what’s adds to God. So for, for some particular reason, I’m going to sell into some other group and roll the business into the r&b part of it and have a bigger group. How were you? How are you seeing that playing out from from your side, from that licensee side? And what are you doing in that space?

Conaill Keniry
Yeah, so there’s a lot to unpack in just that question. So maybe I’ll kind of just tell you what we do. And then just some of the solutions to some of that stuff. So we’ve said, We’re advisors, we created a dealer group, with the advisor in mind, and also the end client in mind. So even just those perspectives are a little different. We have and maybe an evolutionary licensing options. So there’s like a startup option that we have. And kind of what is just a summer to transition from being employed to self employed is really, really difficult. So salaries are getting higher and higher as a financial advisor. So to go from that, to potentially $0 income, and then three, four or five grand out every month in business expenses. That’s a really huge jump. We have seen advisors, right and not succeed, and it’s pretty painful to see when they go into that traditional licensing model. There’s various reasons of why that happens. But one of the licensing options we have is a hybrid approach between kind of employed and self employed, where it’s somewhere in the middle of those two, so that it’s more of a Tippy, you know, putting your toe into the water of being self employed. I can go into more detail on what that is. But we have that we then have traditional licensing, which is a fixed fee option. And then we have like a self licensing option. So effectively, someone’s starting at zero and then going up to a million dollars with the revenue. It’s a different kind of option for each of those business types. But yeah, that narrative of how hard it is to be an advisor, especially a single advisor in a business is difficult. And I think also you can get trapped on a license or in a particular Advisor Group. And you don’t see what else is out there. You don’t know what other options you’ve got. So you know, your licensee turns around and says how your licensing fees are $60,000 a year right now, and your business is no longer viable. You think that’s fat? Well, that’s just not necessarily the case. Yeah.

James Wrigley
So what So what does that transition look like for you? So I step out of here, as you said, I go from a nice salary to zero. I have no clients. I’m starting from starting from scratch. Yeah, all of a sudden, I’m supposed to pay a licensing fee and all of these outgoings to get the business set up in the first place. So hopefully, I’ve got some resources behind me to cover that for a brief period of time. But then if you start getting yourself into a some monthly outgoings, you have to have a few clients coming on board just to cover your outgoings let alone pay your salary. So what does that first was that first does it look like

Conaill Keniry
so? So there’s two there’s two options, so let’s call it the startup licensing option. And the traditional licensing front did all let me explain what that looks like in the startup option first, and then I’ll explain that what it looks like the other one, so that if you look at an established business, and established financial planning business, they have a lot of things. They have a brand, they have a website, maybe they have an office, they probably have lots and lots of leads, and a business like that, and take on an employee, but they take on 100% of the risk, and they pay 100% of the salary. So the risk is very much in the business inside. How we look at it is if you want to come into our business, you can use our brand, there’s no ongoing expenses, there’s no ongoing stuff. We even have leads that we can give you. But if you service those leads, we own the client. So it’s better purposes. Let’s call it a percentage model between the two. However, what that advisor can do is they can take our leads so as their clients You know, replace their income very, very quickly. But on the other side of the coin, they can start building up their client book. So they don’t find their own lead dump on their own client, or that client 100%. What that means is that whether it’s, you know, a year or two years, then when they’re transitioning into a traditional licensing model debri, you book with them, and then not starting at zero? That kind of makes

James Wrigley
sense. Yep, it does. Yeah, it’s the clients that that you own in that model. They, when they go and do their own thing, they, those clients stay with you, your business,

Conaill Keniry
it’s up to the adviser. So do you want to buy the office and keep the clients? Or do you want to leave them with us? And we can get into an IRA advisor, where it’s more about what the advisor wants than what we want, per se? Because either way, it doesn’t matter, then because it’s on the side? Why, since it’s very easy, as well, they’re not really trading licenses, they’re just changing brand name, more than anything else. You know, so we have transitioned our adviser recently in that model, you know, he came to us with not a lot, he had a goal of trying to get to $10,000 per month in ongoing revenue of his own clients got to that he moved across. He didn’t take any of our clients with him. He just wanted his own clients. But he didn’t mean that he’s at 10 grand per month, when he’s in that standard licensing world. Yep. Yep. And, and the other part of this is other, our licensing, we’re trying to help the rest of our businesses, you know, licenses grow, that this is an alternative option as well for them. If they want to add an extra advisor into their business, they’re trying to grow it because you have the same problem on the other side, do you don’t buy get like employed advisor and spend 100 $200,000 a year? What like, that’s very scary for a small business owner as well. So the question is, what other options did they have? This hybrid option is also something they can do.

James Wrigley
So that’s interesting. So you could have a completely standalone business that’s doing its own thing, operating on your license, paying the normal fees, whatever they are, but then to try and bridge that gap between how to go from one advisor to two advisors, because to your point, all of a sudden, you have to pay this person $150,000 in salary and whatever other costs that are going to go with it. You do want to have, you’d either want to have a decent client book to be able to support that, or a lot of leads coming through one combination of both. But you can do that revenue splitting whatever it whatever it is that that hybrid model to get them up and running until they then come across. That’s interesting.

Conaill Keniry
That’s right. Yeah, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Yeah. And I think that this is very much focused on like, the way that we got here, I was seeing these people who were willing to go the traditional route, they were willing to get rid of their salary, they were willing to put their life on the line and try this whole self employed thing. That’s the type of person I’m we’re looking at that this is for, it’s not for the employee, servicing advisor style, I just want her to turn up to work nine to five, it’s someone who’s trying to build something. And then having that personality type in your business is also the personality type that you want. Someone who’s is trying to grow, they want to be a small business owner. Yeah, they they’re an asset to the business. Yep. And then I noticed

James Wrigley
on the website for your licensing business, then then there’s a there’s a self licensed element as well. So someone’s operating their own license, you can support them in some way. What’s that? Like? Sort about? Yeah,

Conaill Keniry
well, let’s go the next step first. Sorry, James. Let’s say that the standard option that the the startup option, and let’s go to traditional licensed sexual, I think that what we then did was we looked at standard license and said, Why don’t you kind of fix the problems that we had in the past? So little thing is like, you know, fix licensing fees, just trying to change the power dynamic. Not everyone has had this experience, but it is those can be bullies on the on a muddy orientation on a compliance point of view on so many elements, we’ve tried to just try to change some of that. And the other part is that they want help in their business. So when you have these single advisors who are out to run a business, and they have questions like, Where do I get extra leads from? Should I spend money on Google ads? How do I get stuff overseas? How do I, what tech can I use? What should my proposal software look like? You know, most episodes don’t have those answers? Well, we have a fully functioning advice business that we get hate. We’re not saying that we’re the best at everything. But if you want to look under the hood, and see what we’re doing and seeing what’s up at you, you can have every piece of knowledge that we have, you know, you’re welcome to it. And then that’s what actually made it inside the licenses kind of grows. So there’s that, and that the next The third option is that self licensing, and it’s not for everyone. If you ask a lot of advisors, the idea of being self license is a bit scary. And what advisors like is the dealer group model where someone’s doing the pay, someone’s doing the compliance, someone’s doing everything, but you do lose a limited control. You are still at the behest of a number Lawson’s kind of like an SMSF rod with an SMSF you get additional control, but you get additional responsibility. Out Self licensing model is very much a, it looks like the license, you’ve just been on the policies of the same, the processes are the same, but it’s ultimately your license, therefore, you can do the make the ultimate decisions and the money goes into your bank account. It’s a dealer group style of self licensing. Gotcha.

James Wrigley
And what made you go down this route of, of starting the licensing business in the first place? Like we were operating your own financial planning business first, and then you had some issues with licensing, whatever it might have been? And then you’ve got like, what, what was the story behind that?

Conaill Keniry
It’s just really interesting. As an advisor, when you ask questions around self licensing, the responses you get back are very often incorrect. I remember someone telling me at six, they’ll give me licenses anymore. And if you do, it’s going to cost you 100. Grand? Nope. That’s how can how can they not be handing out licenses? And and it’s gonna cost me 100 grand, it’s makes no sense. And this guy was an actual lawyer in the industry. So you go down this researchable? What other options do you have? Like where advisors were looking at for a different super fund for your client, you got to do the research, we just went and did the research around self licensing verse dealer grid model. And it just worked for us. We are very much let’s do it a bit different and do it our way. And I think since that dialer, business owner self licensing does work. It is not for everyone, much like an SMSF is not for everybody. Self licensing is not for everyone.

James Wrigley
It’s a HELOC of you operated the license a business.

Conaill Keniry
Oh, 2019. I think I need to check my my dates that great. But yeah. Yep.

James Wrigley
So then maybe if we then talk about the the financial advice business, who kind of Medicaid working back to maybe where it began? Talk us through, you know, what is advice? And what is the business structure look like? And we’re kind of get into some new clients and things.

Conaill Keniry
Yeah. So again, it’s that same theme of trying to do something different, you know, we wanted to an advice business that didn’t use the word wealth, or wealth protection or wealth, any of that sort of stuff. So you know, what if advice was very much that, you know, what, if you can retire early, what if you can do this? So we kind of started from that base. I was living in Melbourne at the time. So I was what advice Melbourne, been my business partner who is 52 sat across everything we’re talking about, here’s the other side of this coin. He was in Brisbane. And, yeah, we were just running our businesses, kind of separately. But it is something that I do say to advisors is, if you are starting out, having another advisor in your business can be very beneficial. You can share business costs, different personality types of better was a different things, having to someone else to bounce ideas off of is very, very beneficial for people who are self employed. And so they’re by themselves. And you can do the structure even have two different companies and one brand like you can still be separate but together. So I think that’s probably why it was easier for us to go from having our own business and to go into our own license was every step of the way. It was 50% of the expense and 50% of the effort, because it was two of us. So definitely made it easier. Inside, what if advice right now, the same thing, you’d always say, you know, holistic advice, real advice, strategic advice, all that, you know that that sort of stuff, the fact that it is our license does make it a bit easier, I think over sells hide things from advisors. You know, that’s why for everything, or you have to, you know, everything needs to go into an SLA, or you have to do foundationist, always on $15,000. When you don’t need an SLA for investment. That’s not a thing you have to do. And so like because they’re trying to mitigate that risk that really push advisors down in one direction. But that’s just not the case. You know, sometimes there is strategic advice. Sometimes it’s not product advice. Sometimes. There’s certain things you can do to make your experience and the clients experience better. And it’s just interesting people’s translation of the legislation.

James Wrigley
How did how did you and Ben come together? If you’re in Melbourne and he is in Brisbane? How did that come about?

Conaill Keniry
So I actually was living in a prison at the time, but we did the AP horizons course. So I met Ben and my wife on the same day in Sydney doing AP horizons. I then came back to Brisbane we did the AP thing. And you know, nudge nudge, wink wink, I moved to Melbourne for work, but obviously it was for her. And yeah, I stayed there for six years. Got married had our first kid and those COVID lock downs which was horrendous. And then you find yourself scrolling realestate.com and ended up back here and bought a house and bought the office and yeah, haven’t looked back.

James Wrigley
Nice. Got good on it. So are you are you spending much time like in terms of the advice business? Are you advising many clients like it sounds like you’re doing a lot of different things that you can play At least not at being an advisor, what’s your day to day?

Conaill Keniry
Well, the way I would describe it is I spent 144% of my time on the licenses, and then another 30% of my time, probably working on the advice business rather than in the advice business. You know, we have a tech stack that every single stage is digital, we try to automate it as much as possible, we’re going through another whole process where we think we can go from six or seven apps down to one app. So that’s a process we’re going through right now. But know the, the seeing clients and really being a good adviser and be able to service clients properly, you kind of need to have your head in the game 100%. So yeah, it’s been a few years now that we’ve kind of stepped away from that.

James Wrigley
So what have you got in terms of a team of advisors? The business?

Conaill Keniry
So what have we got now? So yeah, we’ve got two in Brisbane and two in Melbourne. And I think we’ll add another one or two in January into the device

James Wrigley
environment. Yep. And is that is that to just deal with new new client inquiries and, and leads that are coming through yet? Yeah, we

Conaill Keniry
get heaps of leads. Like, yeah, as time goes, by advice, business, the funnels in which you get leads from it just grows. And then as you have more clients, there’s more referrals. And it just, it does just grow. We only put on another advisor, when we have too many leads, like you. There needs to be an abundance of leads first, and then you would that other advisor on. But yeah, I’d say by January, February, will be at that stage again.

James Wrigley
Where did they where are they coming from? Where where’s the abundance coming from?

Conaill Keniry
client referrals? Facebook community groups, Google ads, social media, like I did six YouTube videos four years ago, we still get leads from that. So yeah, I think it’s just activity create activity. There were,

James Wrigley
I’ve said a couple of videos, for a little while there, you’ll see some videos on LinkedIn as well. They were they were high quality, you’re using a good camera, and you had the lighting set up. And yeah, I did it yourself or someone did it did it with you. But that that will I did it all myself.

Conaill Keniry
And it’s just time consuming. So you know, doing, it always been a year of researching how to record how to edit all that kind of stuff. And then especially on advice, like on these topics, like advice and on licensing, you don’t want to get it wrong, like we’re just having a chat, which is totally fine. You can tell on chatting. If you’re gonna put yourself out there and say and you know what I’m talking about you do it yourself. You just kind of want to cross your eyes and dotted your T’s to just make sure you’re not stuffing up concessional contributions or tripping over your words. It’s It’s time consuming. And if I was going to do it again, and I probably will, I would go for a quicker approach. Yeah, I was writing scripts. I had a teleprompter. I was editing it all myself. Yeah. Did you

James Wrigley
ever go out and buy all the gear? Or did you have all of that? Was it a bit of, you know, photos and video a bit of a hobby for you? To begin with?

Conaill Keniry
No, I think I have a hobby of spending money. So yeah. I think a lot of it comes to back to stress and anxiety. And it’s about trying to reduce that. So for me it was if I can do good quality stuff, that I’m less anxious about putting those videos out there. And it’s so easy in hindsight for me to go, oh, it’s not necessary. But I get it, and why other advisors are hesitant to do video, I think that they’re wrong, and I should do more video. But I could get up in front of 100 people and talk and not care. When I was in that little office pressing record, I was not feeling good

James Wrigley
sound the other way I like I’m sitting in a room by myself, as we’re recording this I, I would quite happily sit in front of it. Like even it was a full get up full. So I just use my phone to record that if it was even a full setup, I’d be more than happy to sit here talking about whatever I was talking about. But the opposite way to get up on stage in front of 100 people and say that same thing. I’d be nervous as anything. So I

Conaill Keniry
think it’s like where your brain goes. Like when I’m looking down the barrel of the camera. I’m seeing the unlimited number of people across the YouTube world where when you’re sitting in front of 100 people, I can just look at that person and I can look at that person. And my brain just goes into this conversational style. Where on video, I don’t know what it is. I could record the first half fine, and then I will just go to nowhere and I can’t Words won’t come out of my mouth. It’s so bad. Yeah,

James Wrigley
I’m interested in something you’ve mentioned before about kind of automating your advice process and there’s six different apps and trying to bring that down to one like it is are you using some off the shelf things that anyone else can use? Is this something some things you’ve built yourself or yes, that look like?

Conaill Keniry
So the current environment is very much off the shelf. The thing that we’re going to is not where I like using a business to help us create it. We’re basically just trying to copy what we’re currently doing and move it into one space. It’s A journey. Yeah, so even something like. So we’ve got a marketing CRM and advice CRM, you know, we’ve got something for tasks, you know, if you’re trying to manage tasks between advisors and staff, you know, we’ve got something for for client proposals. We’ve got, Digital’s like software for to get data from clients, you know, draft and client a question, you then want that all to link together in an act, automate, have an automation element to it. So yeah, it has a bunch of stuff in there. It’s, and you go on this little journey. It’s like, we tried Asana, and we tried clickup. And currently, we’re using Trello. For some of the stuff. Sometimes it’s not necessarily the best app that has all the features. It’s kind of like what works with your business. And yes, it can be time consuming.

James Wrigley
But yeah, yeah. How do you wait, we’re trying to deal with the, and that there’s a lot of apps out there for this. So we use x plan as the main X plans are everything. So well, until the embedded into x plan. Let’s try to get information from the client into x plan. There’s there’s different different things that we’ve looked at. And I’ve been too much involved with other people’s the I know that one wasn’t in New York, this one was good. And in the x plane, one that I have looks atrocious, and it’s a it’s a challenge, my

Conaill Keniry
official answer for you is we use digital software to get some of that data. So you might do a mini factfinder, or whatever it is for a client. And we just use type hall where you just got here, here’s a, here’s 10 Questions add to them. We use humans to do that transition. So all the things we’ve done it all the things we’ve automated, there’s a human element of transposing data across. Because, you know, the husband and the wife gave you a mortgage figure, but isn’t one mortgage bigger? Or is it times two, that given you a salary, but does that including not getting in a SJ, there’s just these little things that we add difficulty overcoming. And until the solution is perfect. You just don’t want to go to an 80% solution. So that all the steps that’s the one bit that we do have humans

James Wrigley
Interesting, interesting is that you say that and so the the the going from the six apps down to the one, that’s something that you’ve got a business helping you try and build something for that. Yep. Yeah. Well, that would that be as part of will other advisors that are using your licensing have? Well, they have access to that after you’ve got it up and running?

Conaill Keniry
We are definitely the guinea pig for a lot of this stuff. The business that we use was like our automations business. So you would have heard of like Zapier? Yep. There are other things out there that are just far more malleable than Zapier. So make is one that we’ve used. And you can, instead of collecting two apps, you can collect three or four. So you might go take in from type form, put it into a Google sheet from a Google Sheet, putting it into a PDF or a PDF, put into an email, send that email to two or three spots, like you can have multiple step automations. And yeah, we just went back to them and said, hey, you know, we’ve got all this stuff going on, do you have a solution to where we can just reduce some of this stuff. And the the project we’re working on is on a licensing level, and on a bit like a, you know, advice business level, but they’re like modules? Yeah, just think of something like Pipedrive, or any other sort of stuff, but you can just customize it a bit more to the financial planning world. You know, like, everyone’s advice process is very similar data gathering, research strategy, SOA, you know, like, a lot of that stuff, I think we can copy and paste across, but we’re just going to be the guinea pigs. And I think that’s the issue with sorry, with scaling, as a single adviser doing it. Here’s why his or her way. You don’t need processes, you don’t really need automation. It’s just, it’s just a bit of a clunky process. When you start adding in admin staff or implementation staff or paraplanners. The bigger you get, the more this structure that you need.

James Wrigley
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What do you think the biggest opportunity is for you in the advice, business?

Conaill Keniry
endless opportunities. It’s pretty ridiculous. I think, probably one of the biggest problems we have is deciding where we spend our time. You know? Yeah, it’s, it’s a pretty big quite well, yeah, we’ve got lists and lists of things we could be doing. But each go pick and choose

James Wrigley
and say what follow up was that what was the biggest challenge but sounds like this year in endless opportunity. But what do you focus on first?

Conaill Keniry
Seek it’s your goal. And this is super cliche, from a financial advisors and using goal based whatever, but I think it’s the same every six months, myself and Ben sit down and do business planning. And we sort of say, hey, well, what is that goal for the next six months? What are we trying to do here? And then you work backwards from that. Are you trying to increase cash flow? Are you trying to increase the value of the business? Are you trying to get an extra day off per week, like depending on what your She tried to do you do and go backwards. I think when you first start out as an advisor cashflow is one of the biggest things. But one of the reasons to be self employed is either to grow a book and grow the value in the background or have flexibility to have time. So the two decisions that business would make me very different. I’m not sure if that answers the question, but

James Wrigley
it does. And it’s an interesting point that you make that I find in lots of conversations I have with financial advisors, they’re all sitting in front of a client, it’s your will, you know, why you try to do this, see what like, what’s the outcome? Okay, and then let’s work backwards. But then forget to just apply that exact same approach to the operations of their business. And we have the same conversations in ESI. Well, should we do this thing? Or should we do that thing was what we were originally trying to get to first, and then we’ll work out should we go this way? Or should we go that way? Yeah, just following that same process. Same with staff, like, you know, that having, you know, check ins and reviews or career progression plans with with your staff, I was trying to understand, well, what is it that you actually want to do with your career? And then let’s work back to how do we support you to, to do that? Yep, just kind of rinse and repeat the same process. We used to do clients for every other element of the business as well.

Conaill Keniry
We have a lot of these, like, that’s the common theme. So we look see our advisors on the licenses more like business partners, I think they see us the same way. So when as soon as they are going to do something, I want to add a staff member, I want to change software I want to buy book, or whatever it is, they tend to come to us first. And so let’s say Hey, guys, what’s your opinion on this? And again, our answers are different. Some advisors are looking for efficiencies, that’s like, Well, why? Well, I’m trying to see my kids more. Or, oh, you know, we have another business who wants to have 50 advisors in their business, that just, you know, that business is gonna invest 10 grand a month on software, where the other business is gonna say, well, like, No, I just want more time. How do I just get more time in this process? And what’s the best way to get to that goal?

James Wrigley
Yeah, you’re in an interesting, interesting spot. Thanks.

Conaill Keniry
Yeah, it’s super interesting. And it’s super exciting. And, like, I don’t know, there’s just so much opportunity in the industry at the moment that I think advisors do get blinded by the noise a bit, you know, licensing fees, and compliance. You know, just trying to step back a bit. I think it’s what a lot of us need to do it.

James Wrigley
Yeah. And I liked it your oath, that you’ve done that over a period of time as the advice business and then built the business around, kind of stepped out to, obviously, to do what you want to do, you’ve probably doing that. Yeah, same exercise itself.

Conaill Keniry
I’ll add one last thing as well is, you hear these advisors and you might hear me talking this way or other things, and it can almost be daunting. When you see these advisors with these big businesses, you’re like, Well, how am I gonna get from here to there? It’s a lot slower and a lot longer than you think it is. So like, I think the advisor, you know, just try to become self employed. Like it’s a five year six year journey. It’s not gonna happen overnight. All the systems we have, I couldn’t do that in a week. It takes years of plugging and trying and switching and like it’s, there’s a process to this stuff that don’t let what other people are doing kind of hinder your own personal growth. Yeah, yep.

James Wrigley
Maybe we finish off kind of circle back to the the advisor games thing that we’re talking about right at the start. You mentioned this, some Melbourne and Sydney event coming up, is there some type of like in others registered to go along, like it looked like fun how to get involved.

Conaill Keniry
So if you jump onto our website, which is the advisor games.com. Today, you it’s literally my job today tomorrow to actually put those other two events on, but we doesn’t have a if you want to be a sponsor register here, if you want to be a participant register here, they do that on our website. And the other thing I also encourage is like a team sport. So if you just want to go on a team with someone else, just register, if you have your whole office, and you want to go, Hey, we want five people to comment, we want to call that team, whatever it is, and compete as a team that it can be your own team building exercise. We kept the numbers on the last one at 50. But I think now that we’ve done one, we’re open to expanding it and making it a bit bigger. I think Melbourne is gonna be an interesting location, because he got like trams and a bit better public transport. And you know, we’ve just done this one before. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas for the next one.

James Wrigley
Yeah, you could look I’m gonna register and I’ll get a couple other people but yet good weather, small business or big business. But it’s great to just find the bigger the business gets in business or working in a reasonable size. It’s very easy to just kind of get trapped in your four walls of that business. Yeah, there are plenty of other people here to talk to you and bounce ideas off. But you get an insulated view of the world or is that these types, I

Conaill Keniry
think it’d be helpful. Yeah, some of the questions you’ve asked like, Hey, What software do you use for this? Just that just conversation, I could talk to you for 45 minutes on. And that’s kind of why I’ve given you this high level, hey, this is what we do. But you know, you kind of need these events. So you need to spend time with people on the businesses to drill into the detail. I think the detail is the bit that’s really important. Yeah,

James Wrigley
yeah. Thanks, Carl. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me cross paths with you in Sydney. If you’re going to the ensemble event coming up or the advisor came down here in Melbourne in March, we’ll see

Conaill Keniry
you and see if you’re holding that cup at the end as the winner go for gold.

James Wrigley
Get my site on LinkedIn. Thanks for joining me. Appreciate it. Thanks. Bye