Engine Room Podcast #14 – Ben Nash – Transcript

Andrew Rocks
Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Engine Room. I’m Andrew Rocks. And today I’m going to speak to someone special. It’s self proclaimed special, actually now. I’m speaking today with the founder and CEO of pivot wealth. Ben Nash. Good morning, Ben, how are you?

Ben Nash
Good to be here, mate, good to be on this side of the microphone.

Andrew Rocks
For once. That’s right. And it’s also great to be interviewing someone who’s a fellow passionate ensemble person and a fellow director of ensembles. So without any further ado, we’ll get into it. And, and given that this is a very rare opportunity for you to be on the other side of the thing, you better behave yourself in this podcast.

Ben Nash
I just I’m just sitting here just waiting patiently for my questions.

Andrew Rocks
Well, what I’m going to hear about is, is the pivot wealth journey, but more importantly, just a bit about yourself, as far as you know, how you’ve got to where you are with pivot wealth, your journey, you know, some of the trials or tribulations? And then you know, a bit of a vision of where you’re looking to take it. But yeah, what’s the Ben Nash story?

Ben Nash
Well, yeah, good to be. I suppose when I started in advice, I actually took me a bit to get into it. I didn’t go straight from school into uni, went out started working, making money. And it was only a few years later that I randomly got given a book about finance that sparked an interest in investing. And then I sort of went down the rabbit hole from there went to uni, studied finance, fell into a job in a pretty big well known financial advice business that will not be named. And it was a great place to learn really solid shop from a technical strategic perspective. And then I was there for a couple of years, started getting a bit of an itch. But too scared to take a leap. Thankfully, they did our jobs for us and made most of the advice team redundant from their left and went to a small business. I’d never really thought about working in a small company before because I was sort of an naively I know now that pulled into that allure of, you know, the big businesses and the mahogany desks and all that sort of stuff. But I when I was looking for jobs, I got approached by this mortgage broker that was running a mortgage broking. And he had a lawyer that was working as well, they were helping people and wanted someone to come in and build the financial advice arm of the business sounded really interesting and exciting, was way out of my depth, but, you know, can talk or at least could talk enough. So talk myself into that job. And, yeah, it was really sort of interesting to learn and try and figure out a whole bunch of stuff. Because in the previous company that I’ve worked in, everything was spoon fed, we were told to how to do everything, he basically just follow the bouncing ball. Whereas in this role, it was very much figure it out, figure out what’s going to work and then do that and and then learn what you will be talking about. So I started in the small company in would have been about 2012 2013. Yeah, and that was actually the time that that ensemble kicked off as well, like around that time, and I knew a couple of the other co founders, Clay, Adrian, Ray J, there were a bunch of other people around at that point in time, we were all sort of trying to figure out advice that was sort of how Ensembl kicked off and learning these things. How, you know, faux fur was all, you know, the front front and center for people to 12 as well, that point of time. Yeah. So trying to figure out, you know, fee for service advice and charging for SLAs and building a charging model that we had no idea what to do there. So yeah, I worked in that business. And I was I was looking to become a partner in in that company. We had those discussions for about 12 months. And it we got right down to the finish line. And then it became clear that there was a bit of a values mismatch around the, you know, how we wanted to serve clients and what we thought was going to be best for them. So I made the call that to leave, and then I didn’t really want to go and work for anyone else. And I sort of, again, naively sort of thought I knew a couple of things. So I decided to start my own company. And then yeah, pivot wealth sort of kicked off from there.

Andrew Rocks
So just a couple of things. You randomly found a finance book that started this whole journey? And was that the catalyst for you to become a prolific author in the financial services space?

Ben Nash
Well, as someone that failed English at high school, I didn’t think that writing a book was going to be have you on the cards, let alone a couple of books. So, yeah, it wasn’t really what I had in mind at that point in time. But I did, I got a lot of teachers in my family. And I was always drawn to the educational aspect of advice. And, you know, trying to create those light bulb moments with clients, I was telling, they gave me a real kick. And I think all advisors do that, you know, that’s a big part of our job is educating people on the strategies and the things and how to make decisions, and how do we equip people to do the best things for them. So that was always something that I got interested in. And then when I started my business, I, again, naively thought I knew you know, enough about advice and actually running an advice model. What I didn’t know about was how to get clients in and content marketing. And that whole world was something that I had no exposure to, but recognize that there was an opportunity there. And yeah, and that’s where the content piece just sort of started. And it’s and it’s build and evolve from there. And look,

Andrew Rocks
it’s a, it’s a very big part of pivot mobile, we’ll get into that as the podcast goes on. But it’s interesting, you mentioned about a lot of teachers and your family, because there’s the whole concept of nature and nurture. And when I hear about your backstory there where the first organization was a large corporate that you thought you wanted, but possibly wasn’t appropriate, and potentially also questioned some of your values that at the time, you didn’t realize, you were formulating, and it wasn’t until after your second incarnation, that you went, No, I want to do it this way. And you probably harked back to that. That nurture of those teachers, sort of giving you if you educate people, and you enlightened people, and you give them that light bulb, then that’s a good thing. That’s a positive evolution. And also, it’s probably something you could create a living out of.

Ben Nash
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that for, it doesn’t really matter. Like I work with a lot of younger people now. And that’s always been a focus for me at pivot. Also, in the previous business. That was a lot of younger people as well, business before, that was a lot of older people. But I don’t think it doesn’t matter where people are on their journey. Typically, when they start working with an advisor, there’s still so much stuff to learn. And then the world of money and markets and strategies and tax rules are changing all the time. So there’s always something else to educate our clients on. And ultimately, I think, I think historically, advice was probably a little bit more, were telling you what to do. But for me, I think that the best advice is, we’re helping you make the best decisions. And I think it’s a significant difference between those two things. But I think that the ladder really does lead to better outcomes for individuals and ultimately, people sort of building their money muscle. And, you know, it’s not just catching the fish who are teaching people how to fish that makes them better clients, and means that we can actually add more value over time as well.

Andrew Rocks
They probably make better referrals as well, if they’re understanding what they’re doing. So the pivot then started what year 2015. So in 2015, you’re out there. And you tell me about your first client? Where did they come from? Because you just admitted that you had very little knowledge of content marketing, which for people listening who follow Him is staggering. But you know, seven years ago, you you’re blind leading the blind? Yeah.

Ben Nash
Well, I think that the first client that I got, I actually got from LinkedIn. And I, when I started my business, I put a website up I put a few different content pieces on there. And then I just started connecting with people on LinkedIn probably spamming a few people and trying to promote the the resources that we had the guides and downloads and remember how this one guy worked in tech sales, and he replied to me quickly said that he wanted to come in I was like, Oh, your show, okay, great. Come in. And then

Andrew Rocks
I was not the classic sales line that

Ben Nash
was in my head. I don’t know if I’ve verbalized that line, but came in had a chat and talked about what we did I shakily foot across my, my little brochure that I had, that I just probably just tightened up the packages on, you know, 15 minutes before and became a client, and then it sort of built from there. But I think when I started the business, it was just me. So and I think that that’s the beauty of financial planning businesses. And granted, it is harder, you know, more costs, establishment costs, and those sorts of things these days, but really, there’s not a lot of costs in an advice business. So you know, if you if you’re charging a few 1000 bucks, which is what I was charging at the time, and thank you didn’t really need a lot of clients. So it wasn’t like there was a ton of pressure there. And yeah, and basically just just sort of built from there, the early stages, it was just myself for the first 12 months in the business. Then I brought my now wife into the business. We’ve worked together for the next two and a half years, just the two of us after that. And I think the first three years in the business, I was bringing on about 20 new clients each year, so it wasn’t anything earth shattering. I was doing, you know, a couple 100 grand in revenue or something. And it was just like so Are slowly ticking up. When my wife and I got engaged, and we’re planning to get married, we were also planning to start a family and realize that something needed to change because at this point, we’re now sort of three and a half years into the business, those 20 clients a year, a bunch of them had stayed on the books. So we had, you know, that there was a base of, of ongoing clients, there will be the number of new clients was also increasing from the work that you know, the foundations that we’d build, and just continuing to sort of follow the bouncing ball, we’ll probably talk a little bit more about that. And we were busy, I was busy, I was working pretty long hours for just for clients, and then trying to actually run a business around that as well. So we realized we needed to grow the team and bring on extra support. Plus, my wife was doing everything else that I wasn’t doing. So I’m thinking like, we’re going to she’s going to have a baby, something’s probably gotta give here. So that was when we started growing the team and, and sort of build on it from there.

Andrew Rocks
And was that the was that before or after the establishment of the growth of the beard that you’re synonymous with?

Ben Nash
Well, I had a beard from day one. That was I had a beard actually, in the first company that I’ve worked in, you weren’t allowed to have a beard at all. That was that was just the rule. And then when I left and went and worked at a smaller company, I had a really short, really manicured, but was it really manicured, it was just a really short beard. Then when I started my own business, I graduated to my self employed beard. And yeah, then there was the COVID beard phase. But that’s probably a memory, I’d rather forget

Andrew Rocks
securing the sound guy, if we could just make sure that attached to this podcast is evolution of the beard, I suppose just you know, changing changing gears a bit there. At this stage, you know, I now know that you’re a father of a couple of beautiful young children. So clearly, building your engine room has worked. So maybe get a bit give me a bit of a feel for what where the current state of your your business pivot is at to two aspects. Because one of the unusual or in fact, impressive parts is the engine room that you have to bring clients into your organization that is particular and quite, quite volumous, I’d like you to talk about, and then once they’re in just the org structure, and how you get people to do things, and what motivates them. So maybe you want to start with what you’ve done to bring people in and congratulate your wife for putting out

Ben Nash
Oh, she deserves a lot of congratulations, that’s for sure. But look, I think one thing that is a little bit different with how we do things a pivot is that we separate out our sales function and our advice function pretty distinctly so separate people, even separate people. So I think that advisors need to be able to sell I think everybody needs to be able to sell, they need to be able to sell ideas, they need to be able to get their point across, they need to sell people to particular with clients, getting them to do the things that they want to need to do to get the outcomes that they want. But one of the things that I realized in growing a team is that it’s actually quite a different skill set from for what you want from an advisor, and what you want from a salesperson. And for for an advisor, or at least at pivot well. We need someone that likes people Sure, but like someone that’s into the detail around technical strategies and supporting clients, you know, nailing their file notes and making sure their SOA is a rock solid, and all of those sorts of things. That’s not necessarily in fact, it’s not actually the same as someone that thrives on, you know, building relationships and selling people just talking to people all day, every day, we actually for an advisor, we’re looking for someone that’s probably a little bit more detail orientated, maybe even a little bit more introverted, that is going to nail all of that detail so that the clients can rest easy knowing that we’re all over that stuff behind the scenes. Whereas for a salesperson, or someone that can talk your ear off and just loves being in conversations, but we don’t really want or need someone that needs to be super detail orientated. In fact, you probably don’t even want someone that’s super detail orientated because when people are buying, they’re buying, you know, on an emotional level at a bigger picture level, rather than an ultra detailed level, at least in my experience.

Andrew Rocks
So one of the questions I’m going to ask when we get into the People section, and just make sure I do remember this is that you’re talking about distinctly different sort of hemispheres of the brain left brain versus right brain and, and what I’d be really curious to learn in due course is, is do you do you recruit for specifically for that? And if you do, do you use any tools?

Ben Nash
Yeah, so like at the moment, we’re recruiting for a salesperson and an advice person, to to separate people. So we use We use a few different ways that we assess people. But one of the big, big ones that we use is the wealth dynamics profiling by Roger Hamilton. Basically, for anyone that’s not familiar with that, it just has that there are four different energies, there’s people energy, detail, energy, creative energy and timing, energy. So for a salesperson, we’re looking for someone that’s more on the people side for, but they don’t necessarily need any of the detail, energy, maybe a little bit, but probably not. Whereas for an advisor, we want them that’s heavy, heavy on the detail side, ideally, a bit of the people stuff as well. But really, the detail needs to be there. So we look at that as a big part. And we know, like that, like, for me, personally, I don’t have any people energy work if you look at my profile, but

Andrew Rocks
that’s going to be shocking for our listener. I didn’t know that that was going to be a point because I do know you as a very specific detailed individual who has managed to teach yourself how to do the people side would that be fair to say,

Ben Nash
Yeah, and I can do it. And I have done it for years, for for 10 years, I did all day every day and still do for a lot of days, I’m talking to people all day. But if I’m just meeting after meeting with people all day, at the end of the day, I feel drained, if I spent a whole day working on a spreadsheet, or a project or a process, I feel pumped, and I want to work all night. So that’s what we want. And it’s like our, we’ve got two business coaches, and we’ll probably talk about this in a bit more detail. But both of those coaches, they’ve got tons of the people energy, and they’ve got very little other detail energy. But both of them if you if they and they have helped us with stuff in the past, where it’s like if we’re working on a process and they need they know that something needs to be done. They can detail up a storm to get it done. And I think that’s the thing with all a great players there. For us. When we hire an advisor, it’s not like they’re not going to be out of the element. Talking to people. Of course, they’re not like a sales manager wouldn’t be out of their element, knocking out a process if that’s what needs to be done. But we want someone where it’s largely in their flow, so that they’re not pushing shit up hill all day every day. And then feeling frazzled at the end of every day.

Andrew Rocks
So let’s throw caution to the wind down. Who were the coaches that you use.

Ben Nash
We use abundance global David Dugan, so been working with him for six, seven years, and Michael Beck is our other coach. Again, too, we’re actually back his first client after he started his business and have been with him all the way through. So that’s a human to human, human human. Yep. Yeah. Both legends in their in their spaces. And yeah, that now I think, like with any good question, it’s the same with our advisors that they a big part of the value that they bring is that they understand us and our business to a level that when something comes up a challenge or an opportunity that they know how we will respond because there’s, there’s no one right thing to do like for our clients, when something when COVID market meltdown happens, there’s no one right way to invest off the back of that. But there is one right way for our clients. And that’s what they sort of caught us to do.

Andrew Rocks
So given that you’ve just articulated that you believe is a new operate a big difference between the sales and relationships and into the execution. If I could maybe just kick to the execution of it. That is a gentleman called Tim, in your organization. Heads up that is that correct? That’s right. And what does that what does that look like? So how many people are in that team, it’s going to get a feel for sort of the engine room that services your inbound clients.

Ben Nash
Yeah, so basically, how the business is structured is that we work under a pod system for our advice team. So we’ve got a senior advisor, an associate advisor, and a paraplanner, our paraplanners Run offshore through our offshore team through VA platinum. Then we have alongside that we have the sales manager. And we’ve got a couple of sales managers in the team, we and then we have a couple of implementation managers as well. So once

Andrew Rocks
the advice is done fulfilling during the applications during insurance, etc. And with with the addition of the sales manager, which would be a more unusual structure. For a lot of our listeners, what does that do as far as volume so with that pod what what kind of volume of, of clients or opportunities we’ll be running through that on a weekly or monthly basis,

Ben Nash
or my a target for advisors is that each advisor in the business can manage a million dollars of revenue. So all of our clients work with us on a 12 month fixed term contract. So basically, we bundle up the initial planning work and the ongoing service over each 12 month period. And the clients pay a one fixed dollar base fee to for us to support them with that. So yeah, so the aim is does that

Andrew Rocks
does that sorry, does that roll on based on the anniversary and they’ve come on or do you have like

Ben Nash
those six weeks term with an end date? So every every agreement needs to be renegotiated. Then a new agreement made for them to continue getting served by and paying us. So it’s not ongoing. What

Andrew Rocks
Why just coincidentally fulfills almost every obligation required anyway? Well, it

Ben Nash
means no fee disclosure statements are not required, because they’re essentially getting their annual statement each year, when they do that there’s no legislated opt in, although practically, we obviously want to opt in so that they keep paying, you know, million dollars, right? Yeah, exactly. So that was part of our thinking in doing it, but also that we’re, you know, we pride ourselves on transparency as a business, we charge premium fees to our clients, our average fee is $13,000 a year. So it’s not a small number, we also charge 100% of our clients through their bank accounts, either personally, or through, you know, through entities if they’re, you know, if they’ve got entities, but they’re aware that they’re charging us a fee. So we Yeah, I suppose there’s no, we didn’t feel like that. It wasn’t already clear. And so therefore, it’s not like a difficult conversation with someone getting them to re opt in to our to our ongoing services, essentially.

Andrew Rocks
So so, you know, if you do the one or two years with a with someone, and potentially they don’t require as much service going forward, well, then you can sleep very soundly. And that you’ve, you’ve clearly priced and articulated the work for when you did it, that you haven’t you haven’t subsidized today for, for this this thing that might name and hope it in the future. Yeah. Which means that you when it comes to rewarding your own team with their, you know, short term incentives, or even ESOP, which we’ll talk about later on, that you’ve properly priced, is that is that

Ben Nash
that’s right, yeah. And that was something that had been taught taught me in fact, one of your round up your new podcast stream coming out with the one and only Mr. Dean Holmes, that taught us that we, you know, when you have a client and they walk away, and you just think back like that I didn’t charge them enough. And now I’ve done all of that work. And, you know, they’ve walked away. And it’s, it’s impossible to escape that because naturally, some clients will take out more of your time and resources as a business than other ones do. And occasionally, you still have that element of frustration. But I do know, hand on heart, that our pricing is appropriate for what we’re we’re charging people such that if someone walks away at the end of their contract, I don’t feel like that we’re way behind.

Andrew Rocks
So if your average fee is $39,000, and you want that million dollars, and that that means that each one of those pods is going to be sort of circuit looking after 100 and something clients each right, that’s correct. 7575 there. Yeah, that’s my maths. That’s 75. There you go. And the new business so maybe we have a look at the the new business because, you know, the Ben Nash and pivot wealth that a lot of our listeners will see is the front. Okay. I’d love to maybe hear about how you do that. Maybe give us an idea of your money education partners, explain what you’ve how you thought about that, who they are, what their works, and then just an insight into something you’ve built called a smart money. Accelerator.

Ben Nash
Sure. So about 25% of our new clients come from client referrals. The other 75% come from our content marketing, essentially, or largely largely, there’s probably maybe 5% that come from our partners. So other mortgage brokers or accountants are referring to us. But largely, yeah, it would be 70 70% or so coming from content marketing, that’s through the main channels, social media. Specifically, Tik Tok is a large number of clients coming through their Instagram increasingly, as well. We’ve got a podcast book or two books that I’ve written, prolific author. Yeah, well, it’s a couple. But a little bit from from there, and then just our email database and marketing out to to that database as well. So those those sources were and we tend to sort of dial them up and dial them down based on the campaigns that we run throughout the year, but they they result in new inbound inquiries. So 100% of our new business comes from inbound inquiries. And then when people make inquiries, that’s when the sales manager’s jobs are to convert them into doing you know, we do a 15 minute phone call then we do a 45 minute meeting then we pitch our services and get the clients to sign on on the 12 month agreement. And then at that point, they get handed over to the advisor to deliver low the advisor and that advice pod to deliver the work

Andrew Rocks
and why just unpack that if you don’t mind because some yet again, departure from the normal one. So I’m an inbound inquiry. I’ve had two or three touch points and something has resonated with me. And I’ve emailed you or made a call to your office, the sales manager this team lead they then give that person a call or a zoom or a team’s whatever it is. And you run through Is it like a as a as a fact find light or what’s what’s the thing that you do to get them into a position where they want to then commit for 12 months and then go down and execute. Yeah, so

Ben Nash
there’s a 15 minute phone call, and then a 45 minute meeting, the purpose of the 15 minute phone call is to make sure that we can help them and that they can afford to pay us. That’s it simple as that we’re not, you know, sort of beating around the bush. And we’re very, very clear with our new in the the inquiries about how that all works, essentially. Excuse me. So when someone submits an inquiry, we basically just send them an email and say, This is what we do here, our services were super transparent with our pricing, we say we do two things. One is our personalized financial advice services, the pricing of that starts at $700 a month. The other is our Smart Money accelerator, which is our group coaching, general advice and education solution that starts at $300 a month. If you want to talk about the first one booking a call here, then they book in a call, then we educate them with some content, basically have that call with the sales manager. They’re just saying what is it that you’re looking for help with, and then what give us a snapshot of your numbers so that we get enough of a sense to know that it’s worth taking the next step for both them and for us, then we chart we do a 45 minute meeting, we charge $195. For that, we donate that money to charity, that through our charity partnership with B one G one. So basically, we are essentially donating our time for that meeting, we want to make sure that the potential clients are serious. So we take that $195, we donate that money chariot makes them feel good. And that’s really helped with it’s really clever,

Andrew Rocks
if your website sort of also gives us a real snapshot of what you can buy with what’s donated. And yeah, it makes it

Ben Nash
real life. Yeah, and we’ve had we’ve made millions of impacts through our partnership with B one G one who’s an amazing company that helps with with business giving, but for us, no one’s making money doing $200 meetings. So I don’t care about $200. But I do care that they stamp up $200. Because if they’re not going to pay 200, they’re never going to pay 13,000. So that was the sort of thinking around that. And then with the 45 minute session, it’s really just help, again, making sure that we can deliver on what we want, and then to help that helping them understand how we will help them so that if they do make a decision to jump in and sign on for that 12 month period, they know exactly what to expect that those expectations are realistic that we can deliver to the expectations. And that basically setting up the advice process for success. Because with the amount of new business work that we do, and the amount of clients that we’re working with, we want everyone to follow the same process, we we know that everyone’s a snowflake, and you know, there needs to be the occasional departure from that, or the intricacy and how we tackle certain aspects of their financial planning or their financial situation. But largely, I want everyone to follow the same process, because that’s the only way that we can drive the engine room of the team that we can manage them manage the task management, how do we know how an advisor is performing how an Associates performing how a power planner is performing how the implementation manager is performing? So we make sure that they’re cool with that? Because some people that that yeah, some, some people aren’t. And that, you know, we know, we can’t be all things to all people, we’re confident in what we do deliver. And, you know, that is what it is

Andrew Rocks
spoken like someone who’s a very detailed focus manager. What I’d really like to know is, so the handover there. So the handover from the core relationship focused person who’s really bonded with this person, they’ve then sold them this great opportunity. And then at some stage, they’re handing them to the detail focused person. So how do you craft that so that it’s a seamless handover and almost seen as a win? For the client?

Ben Nash
Yeah, well, we do. I’ve put together a video that explains how we work together as a team and what people’s different roles are, because as you sort of touched on it is anyone that’s sort of come across Pivot will know that I do most like 90% of the content is me. So I’m sort of like the face of the business, but I actually don’t take on clients. So we put together some content because I kept getting that question. It’s like, Well, can I do the call with you? Can I do the meeting with you? Can you be my advisor? I’m like,

Andrew Rocks
very reminiscent of poor clitheroe back with AIPAC, I, I pack it back in the day where every retiree thought they were seeing the guy from the channel nine. You can’t clone yourself?

Ben Nash
No, that’s right. But we explained to them how they are getting this. And then I’d say that every single like any ongoing client at the business, they can talk to me whenever they want, at any point in time. So if someone wants to have a meeting with me, they absolutely can. There’s a few of them that take it up. Not a lot. But that’s because the team are amazing at what they do. That’s why they’re doing their job. That’s why they are the team. Yeah. So we know that the sales managers do the front end, they shepherd them through then they introduce them to the advisor there. And when I say that we hire people, and maybe they’re a little bit introverted. All of our advisors are great people people and they start strong in those relationships. And they know that in that intro call that they want to pick up on the great work that the sales managers have done, to bring them into the tent, you know, set the expectation set the agenda, pumped them up on the opportunity, I had had Brian King on the podcast, and I love the way that he puts this that he said that he’s a hype man for for his clients. He’s there. He’s a hype man. And that’s what I’ve taught all of our advisors are the same, that it’s like the the sales managers start that the advisors carry it through, and then the team execute on that as well. And I think, you know, when it’s, yeah, we’re, we’re obviously we’re being considered with the words that we put in the structure of how we do that. But ultimately, it is a win for the client. So we just make sure that it’s clear to them. So they’re not just trying to figure out why it’s why it’s structured in that way.

Andrew Rocks
And you are self licensed. And you just explained how, you know, you’re conflict free and whatnot. But when ultimately, you would

Ben Nash
say conflict free sort of restricted term. I didn’t think I said I probably can tell you the visor anymore.

Andrew Rocks
I did I did. I did accidentally say hi CAC instead of AIPAC about five minutes ago. So but is there any Yeah, so the way in which you ultimately invest your clients money is Gemini, Gemini sort of like platforms or providers that you work with best from an operational perspective,

Ben Nash
we use, we, for superannuation, we do a lot of work with AR t. So sons super, and we’ve been working with them for a number of years. Because we’re heavily index fund in passive index fund investing, I would say that, over 80%, probably over 90% of our clients money is invested into passive index funds. So AR t is a solution. For people that want ethical portfolios, and that’s something that our clients are interested in, in the we’re seeing a bit more of them, we tend to do that on platform that tends to be net wealth or hub 24. For personal investments we do, again, similar with the platforms, or sometimes brokerages, directly, self wealth is one of the platforms that we’ve used there for direct ETF investments, and a ton of stuff with Gen life with their investment bonds for a lot of our clients, because we’re working with higher income earners. That yeah, we loving those structures and adds a lot of depth to the strategy that we can do with clients as well. So they tend to get a bit of love.

Andrew Rocks
And what about what about the sort of the technological tethers that hold this together? What’s your tech stack, because ranging from, you know, the social media all the way through to delivery?

Ben Nash
Well, we’re, it’s distinctly different in the bit or distinctly separate, separated in terms of the marketing and sales side, and then the advice delivery side. So on the advice delivery side, we use x plan, we use it extensively we the processes and tasks and the reporting that sits around there, we’ve put a lot of time and

Andrew Rocks
a lot of you’ve mapped out the threads per se is that we’ve done

Ben Nash
all of the threads are there. But beyond that we’ve we’ve got some of the tasks throughout the advice process, we know are more important than others. So we’ve defined those as Ben, what we call benchmark tasks within the advice process. And then basically, every team member has different sets of benchmark tasks. And we we track and manage their completion of those tasks to the timelines that we’ve collectively set together as a team. And that’s an important way that we measure the performance of the team, it also ties into our incentive plan, it ties into the ESOP plan. And it gives for me as a as a leader or as a manager, probably as a manager more than a leader. It allows me to manage but be a data driven manager. Instead of having to have any people energy, I suppose.

Andrew Rocks
Well, I think instead of actually just making reactionary, sort of emotional decisions,

Ben Nash
we know that the data is there. And we also know that we select the pod structure, that that’s something that I wanted to set up so that everyone’s working in their genius zone, so that no one is doing work below their paygrade but so that everybody has a clear progression plan to develop their skills and then to learn more and add more value for the for themselves, their career, the clients and the business moving

Andrew Rocks
forward. Do you call it a progression plan with them or what’s what’s sort of everyone’s

Ben Nash
got their progression plan and that’s again, that’s something that we, we so we do a six monthly progression planning session individually, we do six weekly, one on one to the progression plan. But yeah, we want everybody to be on a be clear on where they’re headed in the next six months to the next two years. And for that to be aligned With the business’s goals and their personal goals, where they want to take their income where they want to take their work where they want to take their day to day. And one of the beautiful things of a growing business is that there’s always opportunities for people to progress their roles in slightly nonlinear parts. And I’m all about that. Because if people are interested in different things, then great, let’s, let’s get them involved in those things. So I feel like I’ve sort of covered a bit of ground there, but essentially, gives me a lot of confidence in the how the work is going. But with with me taking a macro view, on the marketing side, we’re just to close out on that question that we do. We were using the marketing channels directly. But essentially, we use monday.com for all of our sales, tracking and reporting. And for me, that’s super powerful, their data visualization helpful, really easy, like relatively easy to set up, used to use some pretty complicated spreadsheets. This is much simpler.

Andrew Rocks
And you told me that super complicated spreadsheet gives you energy and brings you but maybe Monday’s will also give you energy. Absolutely. And before we move on to sort of the team, how are you running your people? I just want to ask a question. So you’ve got a, you’ve got sort of an incubation, you’ve built an incubation for future clients around that, that Smart Money accelerator and whatnot. And lots of other people potentially have thought about it or have done it. What’s the matriculation from someone who’s engaged into that moving into your full service?

Ben Nash
Yeah, so the smart money accelerator is like you say, it’s like an incubator solution, that what we realized we were generating all of these potential clients, these leads or these prospects, and we know that at the our average price point at $13,000 a year that there’s there’s a pretty significant contingent for it well, you know, law of large numbers, that there’s a lot of people that aren’t quite ready for our full financial advice service. So we wanted to do something to keep them in the 10. Absolutely, to make some money. And to also help them get to that point faster. So we develop this Smart Money accelerator service where we can do that for so basically, essentially help them save more money, invest more money, but importantly, keeping them in the in the tent with regular touch points and interactions with the business so that they can step up when you know when, when it is appropriate for them to do so. We only launched that in March. So I launched it to coincide with the launch of my book, when that came out. What’s the book called pin, replace your salary by investing subtle, not, not subtle plug, get around it on all good booksellers of choice. But yeah, I wanted to put it out so that it lined up essentially with that, because I figured that’s gonna get out to people as well, and probably cast the net even wider. That again, I know that there’s a lot of things that people can do. And previously, we’ve been letting those people just figure it out and broadly stay in touch with us, but we wanted to make something sort of a bit more formalized. So it’s still pretty early days. But we have had a number of clients already that have joined and then graduated through because they get a sense of what we’re about. They see that it’s not scary, they see what the opportunity is. And I’ve also been thinking that people, sometimes for people that are actually at the start ideal clients for the $13,000 thing, that maybe they don’t want to commit that much money because they don’t know. And it’s all well and good to have a great sales meeting and have a lovely brochure and have some nice tiktoks from someone. But it’s another thing to pony up that level of commitment. So committing at 300 bucks a month, and then going oh, yeah, actually, no, this sounds pretty good. Yeah, that lines up with what I’m thinking, oh, let’s do the dance, then that seems to be happening. So I’m pretty excited about that. And I also think that like for a lot of advisors, really that we need to get better at that as the as the cost of advice increases around Australia and around the world that people are priced out. And we need to be doing something for those people because they still need help with their money and tech is filling the gap but advisors need to be doing that as well. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there for advisors

Andrew Rocks
needs to be hybrid approach. Absolutely. And you’re right not everyone trusts you day one and that’s a function of their nature and nurture could be a function of of their experience in the past, but with you the name of your book and having read a large swathe of your book, the name Rich Dad Poor Dad cool dad was obviously trademarked and taken is that correct?

Ben Nash
Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, the naming is not my strong suit. I had to get Clayton to put the name on my first book. So at least this one I did come up with on my own but fantastic pretty practically like, you know, it does what it says on the tin I suppose.

Andrew Rocks
So we’ve spoken a fair bit about where you’ve come from in the machine that you’ve built and how it and we’ve probably enlightened some people We’re enlightened, the fact that this marketing doesn’t come naturally to you, but you have a data driven, analytical approach to it with a real, ethical and transparency bent, which comes through in spades. But my question to you is about your team. Okay, so you’ve got a headcount of just under 20 people, why do people join you? Why do they stay? And why would they grow?

Ben Nash
It’s good questions. Look, I think that we, we know who we are, we’re not trying to be all things to all people. And we know that there’s amazing where private wealth. But look, I think that to answer a different question, if you were to say like, what are your points of difference that the points of difference for pivot wealth as a business is that we’re very results driven? And I know that that’s a really dumb thing? Well, it sort of sounds a little bit dumb to say, as an advisor, but I think historically, that we’re advisors are probably a little bit guilty. And I know that I’ve been there getting excited about delivering financial plans. But ultimately, like the people only want the financial plan as a stepping stone to get more money in their bank account to have a better retirement, all of those sorts of things. So I think the more we can do about actually delivering those outcomes for clients.

Andrew Rocks
And can I call you out on that, because literally the first or second page on your website, it pops up saying that the pivot wealth delivered $72,000 $7,203 $71,203 worth of savings or worth of benefits to your clients. Now, that’s a lot bigger than 13. How do you get to that? And potentially, there are other advisors out there, this is happening too, but just don’t have the self awareness?

Ben Nash
Yeah, totally. Well, I think that as as the business grew, and the team grew that I as and I’m sure that there’s be a lot of founders out there that could identify with this, that when you building everything yourself that it’s often really easy for you to explain everything, because you understand all of the stuff that sort of sits behind the scenes. Whereas when you start bringing new people into the team that haven’t been as intimately involved in every single aspect of your advice, process and business and your clients, and they don’t understand all of that stuff, that you need to give them things that they can hang their hat on, or at least that was what I felt. So we’ve spent a lot of time quantifying the results and the outcomes that people get from the work that we do. For us, there’s there’s three different ways that we measure that. And this is not unique to us in any way. It’s just we’ve spent some time sort of thinking about it and pulling the data out there. As advisors that we deliver what we we call the the advice outside, which is a $71,203 number that you saw on our website, what how we measure that is we look at the trajectory that our clients are on when they come to us. So if they keep doing exactly what they’re doing, when they walk through our door, what is their financial position look like in 12 months time, five years time, 20 years tossing Polaroid, yes. And then we compare it to after they go through the financial planning process, they decide to do things a little bit differently, they make some investments, they pay down some debt, they crank up some contributions or whatever. And then they end up on a different trajectory, we measure the difference between those two. And that’s where that number comes from. So we’ve looked at it and said that on average that that alpha is $71,000. So for me, that means that that makes, you know, it’s a pretty easy decision, do you pay 13 to get 71? For me, that’s a bit of a no brainer.

Andrew Rocks
And if I’ve just joined you, that’s a pretty easy thing to hold my head on, which is a data in fact based statement. Absolutely. So you mentioned results driven, what else? What else do people join you because we don’t make

Ben Nash
people feel dumb. That’s the other part of it. So we’re, like, approach didn’t see

Andrew Rocks
that on the website, but that’s coming website.

Ben Nash
But look, we were pretty casual. Like I call it the playful professional approach that, you know, our team, and it’s probably largely driven by my comfort in, you know, drawstring pants, and you know, having a beard and wearing T shirts, and I’m not a suit and tie type advisor, no one in our team wear suits as well that we, you know, we are who we are. And we know that we’re we’re people. You know, people can be who they are, but then they still do amazing work behind the scenes and provide people with, you know, awesome results outcomes. You can do that in a T shirt. So our clients get that and they’re comfortable with that. And I think that for our team that, you know, we’ve particularly with advisors that we’ve had them do have joined from the, you know, bigger institutions and you know, not having to wear a suit every day is pretty compelling. But also having authentic Frank relationships with our clients and I know a lot of advisors do that as well. But yeah, really just because we are so heavily involved in people’s lives and lifestyle planning to drive the financial decisions that they make, that you end up, like being a really crucial part of someone’s life and helping them shape the decisions that they make. So I think, to go back to your question, it’s that the work has a real impact that it does actually work were incredibly transparent in what we do were one of the few businesses around the place that are entirely fee only. So if

Andrew Rocks
you guys don’t deliver, like, if you don’t deliver, they’re not coming back for the next 12 months. So that puts massive competitive pressure on everyone playing. I agree.

Ben Nash
Absolutely. And we haven’t built the reputation that we have in the market by not delivering for our clients as well. And we know that people do need to take a leap of faith before they come in. But we can show them all of those results. We’re confident we deliver, we have to show them after we deliver the plan, what is the upside that they get. So you know, if you want to do real great work that has a great impact with great people, we’ve got to know dickhead policy with our clients. So I feel like that’s a really compelling thing that we know that if someone is not the right fit either from a financial perspective, but importantly, from a mindset perspective, or what they want perspective, for us we would eat we know that it’s easier to let them go and find another business that is the right fit for them than us trying to fit a square peg in a bad business is a productive business. I’m not sure. But anyway, it’s you know, good work with good people that respect and value the work that we deliver for them. Because we know that that’s the only way we can create the you know, good long term relationships. What that means is that people’s days get to be enjoyable. Plus, also just what we’re talking about selling points that because of that structure of how the business works is that we’ve got specialists in all of the areas, you know, for an advisor, they don’t have to muck around with sales meetings and prospecting and having you know, five hours a week or a day a week taken up with chasing up people and trying to get deals done. We’re not we’ve got people for that,

Andrew Rocks
because you got a business development manager or sales role specifically for that. Yep, that’s right. And

Ben Nash
we’ve got I think you mentioned earlier that implementation people got associates to do that, you know, any basically, we only want the advisor to do what the advisor needs to do, then we’ve got the associates and they love trying to do stuff that the advisor can do because they’re developing, but it means that the plan Yeah, gets to do less. Yeah, exactly. So I’m a big one on you know, people working in their genius zone, and then having other people develop into the stuff that they enjoy doing less.

Andrew Rocks
So I’m on that your team. I’m here today in your wonderful podcast studio in George Street, in Sydney, but you’re a hybrid team or work from anywhere you’ve got a global team, maybe you give us a feel of of where you are now and and how what things that you and your team put in place to maintain sort of the cadence of operational cadences as far as meetings, but also, how you have fun together, given that you are potentially not all in the same office?

Ben Nash
Yeah, well, we’ve got the two office locations. So we’ve got one office in Cebu through VA platinum that the guys work out of there. And there’s a number of other businesses, it’s a co working space, like this is a co working space that we’re in today. Our Sydney team, or our Australian team is all based out of our Sydney office. Although we do have work from home, you know, Pete, we’ve got flexible working arrangements, but all of our team members are primarily based out of the Sydney office. And the reason that we do that is we’re a growing business, we know that everyone’s developing and learning and we learned better as much as we you know, you can crank out work on Zoom, that we learn better when we’re when we’re working together.

Andrew Rocks
And you don’t have the luxury when when you are a growing business to make mistakes. Yeah, and have big blind spots.

Ben Nash
And it’s easier Yeah, and we’ve got a lovely office here, you know, there’s sparkling water on top, which we’re enjoying here, we’ve got the golf serum upstairs, a ping pong table downstairs, it’s we’ve got a lovely space there so that people can work in in a good space and also bring a good vibe into their meeting, even though we’re still doing 99% of our meetings are done virtually, with clients. You know, I think having that good space is is important.

Andrew Rocks
And I’ll play devil’s advocate here because you know, if we had $1 For everyone who said, you know, people stay with us because the ping pong table they do. They do stay with you for the first little bit because of that, but in reality, it needs to be about their also their career progression, both from an intellectual but also a financial perspective, at pivot have have you introduced things like employee share scheme, or any other kind of rewards that enables your team members to flourish?

Ben Nash
Yeah, well, I think that, you know, talking about the engine room that it was two years ago that we we started, really ramping up the focus on team basically and we sort of skipped a couple of steps in terms of the evolution of the business, but we had a really small team, then COVID happened, market melted down then it started going ballistic. And at that time, our team basically tripled within the 12 month period, our team size Wow. So we grew from six to about 18 Really quickly, not ideal for a whole lot of different reasons,

Andrew Rocks
if you type in state,

Ben Nash
you know, like you’re barreling down the expressway with, with things not sort of, you know, 100% built for that, we’ll learn a lot of lessons in there, then our team size actually came down. And from that point, we realized that we need to go all in on team, how we’re working together, how we’re developing the team, how we’re rewarding the team, how we’re measuring the team. And that’s where a lot of the things that I’ve already touched on, a lot of them sort of began from and then evolved into, but essentially now, what we do for is that basically, every world that the two main roles, and we’re working through the business, but essentially for our advisors and Associates, that there’s a clear salary banding and progression plan. So it’s basically like, if you achieve these, if these three different stages for an associate, you know, your incomes or is going to be this, then it’s going to be this, then it’s going to be this for an advisor, they’ve got income bands, which are based on the revenue that they generate, as well as with the, with the gate open around the net promoter score with their clients. So basically, so long as you’re at a certain level of net promoter score, and your revenue increases, that then we we can tie that back in. That’s all because we are entirely sort of fee for service and not linked into products. That’s all like, what are those things around the compliance, there’s a word for it, but complete and rim, you know, safe and all that sort of stuff. So that’s all really clear. So in addition,

Andrew Rocks
so a quick one on on net promoter score. And I wanted to raise this here. So because sometimes people who are analytical just say, well, let’s revenue less costs equals the bid the keep and if the more you keep, the more will pay you. But would it be fair to say that an improving or indeed declining Net Promoter trend is a pretty good indication of whether people are going to renew? Oh, is that leading, so you would have a waiting I imagine that’s what it is very much a leading indicator. So for those people out there building their engineroom, I would want 100% endorse what Ben in the pivot team are doing because no point paying a bonus for someone who’s done a scorched earth.

Ben Nash
Well, that’s it. And that’s what for the Net Promoter Score, we measure at the start of the you know, once someone joins them once they get their plan throughout the middle period, and then at the time that they renew, or don’t renew, I suppose, when when it comes to the salary banding, we’re really just looking at the front end NPS because we want to make sure that you can like I could onboard 15 clients this week if I wanted to, but I would do a terrible job, because there’s no way that you can do all of the things that you would actually need to do to do a good job in that amount of time. So we want to make sure you’re doing the work. But it has to be of a level of quality that the clients are satisfied at the back end, then we know that if you keep your clients happy, they’re gonna keep renewing, and then your ongoing revenue is going to build, therefore your total revenue is going to build and therefore your salary is going to increase. So it’s like an inbuilt mechanism for the advisors that, yeah, they could not have happy clients, but then they’re not going to renew those clients, and then their revenue won’t grow, then we’re having a different conversation.

Andrew Rocks
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. And but you can tell that so

Ben Nash
but we do that we do, then we’ve got this a team incentive plan. So basically, every person in the team can earn 50% of their salary, like their total rent package each year, in bonuses or incentives, or whatever label you want to put on that, which is split between our employee share options plan, which we set up so an ESOP, where we’ve carved out a bunch of equity into the business granted to the team vest over a period of time, as well as cash incentives based on their performance as well. Really clear lines of, you know, his analytical process focus type person, that there’s clear metrics that, you know, if this, then this, it’s not like how much do I think someone’s worth? Or how much do they get? It’s like, literally, you achieve these outcomes, you get these points, they contribute to this, that means this amount of dollars,

Andrew Rocks
and given the way your prices, you can be very close to cash accounting. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ben Nash
Well, we know what’s what, because we’ve got agreements for stuff. So it gives us a clear line of sight to figure out what’s appropriate.

Andrew Rocks
So we’ve discussed a bit about sort of the evolution of your practice. And the way in which you know that the key take out is that you’ve divided the the sales role, and the execution role into pods and the client experience and what would be the percentage incidentally, of the renewals roughly of clients from deciding to continue every year?

Ben Nash
We it works currently sits around 50%. Although we’ve gone through a couple of evolutions of our service in the last two years, such that the current evolution in its format is only just over 12 months old. Okay, so

Andrew Rocks
data coming from maybe asking in 12 months time Yeah,

Ben Nash
because we only switched to the 12 month fixed term contracts to on the first of June by the first of July. I’d rather basically two years ago, and then the first, our first version of the 12 month fixed term contracts was not good. Learn a lot of lessons there in terms of like really complicated, structured, you know, not in the right way. So then we had to sort of unwind that and then filter more people through. So yeah, that

Andrew Rocks
makes sense. Because, you know, quite often when people come to you, the catalyst for them coming to you is because they’ve got a bit of a mess, they’re going to be a mess, they kind of don’t understand where they’re at. So there actually is a fair bit of work. And ironically, when I had the announcer business, we would often laugh that, that that if you did your job really well, in the second or fourth year, there’s not as much to talk about because you nailed it. Maybe when they go and have kids or they change jobs, you know, they come back to you and they’re never leaving, and you bring you reengage on that phase, but but yet, the better you do your job and the better you’ve structured their plan, potentially, there might be a little bit of time where that is making it when. And then as life moves on, right? You got a lot of wealth accumulators in your client. Yeah.

Ben Nash
And well, I think about a quarter of our clients are probably where they’ve got some certain things that they need to get done in the first instance, and that first 12 months, it sets a lot of those things up again, with that Smart Money accelerator, we can now take people down into that lower touch lower cost service, and then wind them back. And we know so it’s that year’s the year to renew from year one to year two, where he’s going to have a higher level of drop off. Once we go from year two to year three, then our renewals are like 75%. Because we know that they’re people where we can add consistent value over time, and then it’s a higher number,

Andrew Rocks
and they probably have more things going on with them as well. So I’m keen to also hear about, you know, you’re across a lot of different financial planning businesses, with your experience and, and being part of the founding team at Ensembl. You’ve seen different different sorts of business models. What do you see as far as your vision for the future of the structures of financial planning firms?

Ben Nash
Well, I think it’s sort of like what we’ve spoken about already where advice, businesses are getting more and more premium, sort of similar to what we’ve seen in the accounting space, where you’re working with people that have more ways that you can add value, you can charge more fees. And I think that’s where the you know, the higher touch advice businesses will go, I think there’s a huge gap for us to feel as an industry and partly with technology as well, for everybody else. We’ve already seen, you know, more and more solutions come around investment management. And I think that that will continue. I think education based solutions are like what Vinson the team are doing over at life Sherpa, like phenomenal business, really data driven, you know, ultimately, really cheap, cheap relative to an advisor, subscription model, tons of value in it, though, but through that more quality data collection, which is still very laborious and resource intensive process for advice businesses. So I think that will develop more. And yeah, I think that we’ll see better, you know, through either AI or AI with better content and video, people educating ultimately helping people make better decisions with their money, which is what advisors are doing. It’s just when the decisions are slightly less complicated and lend themselves a little bit more to doing that, I think that we’ll see technology and more scalable solutions filling that space rather than a than a human sitting across from someone.

Andrew Rocks
And so, seven years in at the moment, you’ve got just under 2020, in your team, spread, spread, spread between two countries, but the advice is here in Sydney, Britain saying that your clients are from everywhere, because they they’re there quite often digitally engaged. What’s the future for pivot? Are you a looking to sort of now that you’ve you’ve always beta tested a lot of your different sorts of things, you know, you mentioned then you’ve had some successes, you’ve I’m wearing some things now that you’ve got this proof of concept, and you do have quite a lot of people who who follow the the way in which you think and the way in which you position? Where do you see the growth of the business? Would you be interested in growing into different states or what what’s your vision?

Ben Nash
Yeah, well, we, our grand vision is to have 100 advisors in the team 2028 looking after $100 million of revenue, so pretty, that’s actually scares the shit out of me.

Andrew Rocks
We didn’t speak about this before, but that’s just that’s just by buying up for failure. Okay, so you need to find 100 100 advisors and 9797 97 advisors. And no doubt you’ve got the ability at the front end to do that. So what that where do you see then the role of the general manager Chief Operating Officer, because clearly you can’t be both and you’re not both in your current business. So are we going to be seeing a new bear Nash? Or are you going to clone yourself? Or are you just going to be putting in better structures or more structures for your operations team?

Ben Nash
Well, I think that as the business grows and evolves, that we’re bringing in more people to drive different parts of the engine room of the business. So the last two years have been really like, particularly the last 12 months have been really consolidation periods. For us as a business, we going back three financial years ago, growing between 50 and 75%. To from last financial year to the one that just finished, we grew by sorry, the year before we grew by 15%, last year was closer back to 50%. But it’s been slow, it feels slow after after growing it, you know, 75% year so trying to sort of pump the brakes and, and make sure that we had our structures engine room right before we keep going down the path, I think took took a fair bit of patience. But as I see it, there’s six engine rooms in the business, you know, you’ve got your leads conversion, client delivery, operations, leadership and your product and innovation. So over time, the intention is to bring in people to head up those those engine rooms and then remove the dependency from me for doing it. I’m still currently responsible for for the six. But Tim, that’s driving a couple are actually just one of our superstars about to come back from Matt leaves. So she’s going to take over one, potentially two, and I think that that evolution will continue, I think for for any advice business to be successful, it needs to, we need you want to have people you don’t want to be dependent on any one person, it doesn’t matter who that that person is even yourself in the business. Yeah. And as much as I enjoy, you know, creating content and educating people and and being on social media, I think for me successes, that’s all happening without me having to do that, not to say that I won’t, but just without it needing to be what happens for the business to be sustaining.

Andrew Rocks
And I think it’s, it’s fair to say that to get to that 100 that will have to be at some stage in the journey.

Ben Nash
But in the very short term, we spoke so many tiktoks I can do

Andrew Rocks
In the very short term, we spoke just before this about, you know, I said, Well, you know, we’re right now Where’s, where’s your problem? All you need? And you basically said, Look, we have an extraordinary number of of inquiries, but we’re deficient. One senior financial planner to to do the execution of work and, and one BDM, or, or business development manager or sales person right now. So you literally looking for people as we speak.

Ben Nash
Yeah. So we were recruiting for a sales manager and a senior advisor at the moment. They’re the two big ones for us. We’ve got a ton, and it’s increasing.

Andrew Rocks
So is that the evolution of a new pod? Is that what you’re thinking?

Ben Nash
Or no, because we’ve got two sales managers at the moment, but one of them is a financial adviser. And he’s actually a really great sales manager, but he really wants to be an advisor. And he will be a great advisor, I wish that he’d be happy to just stay in.

Andrew Rocks
You might listen to this, but the way

Ben Nash
he’s actually taken five weeks leave over in Europe at the moment. So you know,

Andrew Rocks
So you’re looking, you’re looking, you’re looking to fulfill his progression plan and get into

Ben Nash
place here and then release him as an advisor. And then we bring in another senior advisor. And we’ve just added two, two advisors to our capacity that uplift our new client capacity by about 1212 new clients a month, which is a pretty significant uplift. And then from there, we backfill the rest of the pod, you know, once we’ve found that person, we want to find someone that works in well with them to deliver the work that sits underneath but has to start from the top. And then and then go down from there. At that point, you know, we’ve got then we’ve got five advisors, five pods,

Andrew Rocks
times that point 20 by 20. Game on. Yeah, so apart from being a charismatic frontman, in your business, you’re a fellow director of ensemble and, and the big, the big positive of that is that you’ve, you’re in the trenches, you’re running, you’re working in a business, you understand all the positives, you understand all the challenges, and I’d like to thank you for taking your time not just for this one, but your continued guidance and, and continual feedback loops for for the ensemble business, to make sure that we’re continually always making sure that we’re staying relevant to the problems day to day.

Ben Nash
Well, Rocksy, I’m happy to be the last man standing because it’s funny when when XY Adviser started back in the day, it was all advisors and slowly it’s like if people retire from advice, and, you know, it’s it seems to be the progression. So I don’t know if I’m the crazy one, or maybe you guys are but anyway, well Uline into the advice industry. So

Andrew Rocks
that’s it. It’s been a pleasure, Ben, thank you very much for unpacking your engineroom and I wish you all the success in the future mate.

Ben Nash
Thank you sir appreciate it. See you guys.